The declaration, in line with the country’s Disaster Management Act, allows the state to “take all necessary measures to… minimise the effects of disasters” among others.<\/p>\n
Officials in Lesotho \u2013 a country of just over two million people – say the move will allow the government to quickly divert funds to programmes aimed at getting young people into work and helping the economy to recover.<\/p>\n
Several departments have already announced initial steps, including scrapping business registration fees for small and medium-sized start-ups.<\/p>\n
The textile-dependent economy was already grappling with sky-high unemployment, especially among young people, before Trump slashed aid and raised trade barriers, according to an AFP report.<\/p>\n
Lesotho was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the US’s African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa), which gives favourable trade access to some countries to promote their economic growth.<\/p>\n
According to the US government, the two countries traded goods worth $240m (\u00a3187m) in 2024, mostly exports from Lesotho to the US, in particular textiles and clothing.<\/p>\n
But that ended when Trump imposed a 10% tax on Lesotho, along with other nations, earlier this year. The additional 50% was suspended.<\/p>\n
One of Trump’s aims with his tariff announcement is to reduce his country’s trade deficit with the rest of the world.<\/p>\n
The government has warned it could lose up to 40,000 jobs if Agoa is not renewed at the end of September, according to AFP.<\/p>\n
Lesotho’s Trade Minister Mokhethi Shelile told South African business news site Moneyweb last month that US buyers were “not placing orders because they don’t understand what is going to happen”.<\/p>\n
The country was also hard-hit by the termination of the US Agency for International Development’s (USAID) programmes around the world.<\/p>\n
Lesotho is among those countries that benefited from the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar), which was launched in 2003.<\/p>\n
Critics say this crisis has been looming for well over a year.<\/p>\n
Until March, Lesotho was under an eight-month state of disaster due to severe food insecurity.<\/p>\n
At the time, Prime Minister Sam Matekane said around 700,000 Basotho were facing extreme hunger, worsened by prolonged drought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The declaration, in line with the country’s Disaster Management Act, allows the state to “take all necessary measures…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":250894,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3090],"tags":[51,1700,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-250893","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/250894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}