"I thought I was going insane. It made no sense," the 29-year-old said at her house in the capital Maseru. "When the truth started sinking in, I felt so helpless."

Lefalatsa's monthly factory wage of around 3 000 Rand ($168) had supported herself, sent her 12-year-old daughter to school and paid for the blood pressure medicine her elderly grandmother needs to survive

Now that income is gone, and she still does not understand why. She's not alone.

When Trump announced tariffs on imports for nearly all of the US' trading partners in April, the Southern African mountain kingdom of Lesotho was singled out for the highest rate: 50%.

Lesotho officials were baffled, not least since their country, which Trump disparaged as a nation "nobody has ever heard of", was the poster child of a flagship US programme aimed at helping poor African economies develop through trade.

The Trump administration has defended the tariffs as reciprocal, saying that Lesotho charges 99% tariffs on US goods. Lesotho officials say they do not know how the White House arrived at that figure.

The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to a written request for comment.

Lesotho's textiles sector, its leading export industry, is heavily dependent upon the Africa Growth and Opportunities Act, a US trade initiative that offers qualifying African nations duty-free access to the US market.

On the back of that preferential tariff treatment, Lesotho developed a textiles sector that, until now, was the biggest private employer with some 40,000 jobs and accounted for roughly 90% of manufacturing exports, according to Oxford Economics.

Exports to the US under AGOA, including Levis and Wrangler jeans from a textile sector that largely employs women like Lefalatsa, make up a tenth of Lesotho's $2 billion gross domestic product.

That now looks set to disappear.

This week Lesotho declared a national state of disaster due to the "high rates of youth unemployment and job losses" caused by uncertainty surrounding the tariffs.


--Reuters--