In Lesotho, the small southern African nation that is among the countries hardest hit by President Trump’s new tariffs, business owners were meeting on Wednesday to strategize their response.
For a country with an economy worth just $2.1 billion, few options are on the table.
Mr. Trump imposed a 50 percent tariff on Lesotho, owing to the trade deficit between the country of 2.3 million people and the United States. Only Saint Pierre, a sparsely populated French archipelago off the coast of Canada, was hit the same tariff increase.
On Wednesday, Lesotho’s private sector was looking to the government for answers. The government, facing the prospect of huge job losses, was preparing to make its case to the White House.
“There’s a lot of panic,” said Thabo Qhesi, a business analyst who attended the business owners’ meeting, held in Lesotho’s capital, Maseru. The most anxious people in the room, he said in a telephone interview, were those connected to Lesotho’s textile and apparel industries, which export about 70 percent of their products to the United States.
“They have no option but to close down or relocate to the countries where it would be more profitable to them,” Mr. Qhesi said.
Most of Lesotho’s garment factories are owned by Chinese and Taiwanese companies that set up shop to take advantage of preferential terms allowed under the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a trade agreement with the United States.