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Major economies like China will be hit hard by President Trump's tariffs. So will some of the world's poorest countries like Lesotho, which has been targeted with the highest tariff for a single nation. Kate Bartlett reports.
KATE BARTLETT, BYLINE: Only last month in his address to Congress, Trump said that, quote, "nobody has ever heard of Lesotho." But by this week, he'd slapped the tiny African mountain kingdom with 50% tariffs. Trade with the U.S. amounts to 10% of the country's national income.
TLOHANG LETSIE: This is going to be a very serious blow to almost all sectors of life in Lesotho.
BARTLETT: That's Tlohang Letsie, a professor at the National University of Lesotho. He says the textile industry will be particularly hard hit. And ironically, that industry produces a product that is as American as apple pie.
LETSIE: Lesotho exports textiles to the United States of America. It exports designer jeans such as Levi (ph), among others.
BARTLETT: Sometimes dubbed the denim capital of Africa, the small kingdom, which is surrounded entirely by South Africa, has garment factories also producing Wrangler jeans and other iconic U.S. brands. According to economic analyst Thabo Qeshi, the industry is the largest in the impoverished country and directly employs around 30,000 people, most of them women.
THABO QESHI: The new tariffs are really going to kill textile and apparel sector here in the Lesotho.
BARTLETT: Only last month, millions of dollars in USAID funding to the country was cut by the Trump administration. So why did the Trump administration slap Lesotho, a small country with a modest GDP of 2 billion, with huge tariffs? Because it has a $235 million trade surplus with the U.S., thanks mostly to the U.S.'s own preferential trade policy, the African Growth and Opportunity Act. The closure of garment factories, in particular, many of which are owned by Chinese and Taiwanese companies, will have dire consequences, says economist Ratjomose Machema.
RATJOMOSE MACHEMA: It will have a devastating impact on the macroeconomy as well as the GDP of the country, that we are likely to see a shock going forward.
BARTLETT: Lesotho's trade minister, Mokhethi Shelile says he will now be sending a delegation to Washington to try and change Trump's mind.
For NPR News, I'm Kate Bartlett in Johannesburg.
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