Earlier this week, a 50% tariff on Indian exports to the United States came into force. Structured to hit 66% of goods arriving into the US from the subcontinent, the Trump administration’s economic powerplay ramped up the existing 25% levy, hitting goods valued at roughly $86.5 billion USD.
Given India’s position as a textile manufacturing hub, massively reliant on exports, the move is certain to disrupt an already unstable garment industry, sending shockwaves well beyond the country and its main commercial enterprise.
Ajay Srivastava, founder of the New Delhi-based think tank Global Trade Research Initiative and a former Indian trade official, notes: “The new tariff regime is a strategic shock that threatens to wipe out India’s long-established presence in the US, causing unemployment in export-driven hubs and weakening its role in the industrial value chain.”
The tariff increase leaves Indian-based businesses with two choices: relocate or shut down entirely, continuing as things are is no longer a viable option. What, then, does this mean for a globally-recognised garment manufacturing capital?
While businesses are naturally the first to come to mind, with tariffs positioned as a matter of geopolitical business or economic politics, it’s more important now than ever to remember that the effects extend beyond the markets and into the lives of the people who keep those markets moving.
Much has also been made about European postal networks suspending the delivery of parcels to the US. A blow indeed to small-scale sellers and producers across the world, it’s also fair to say that the removal of the $800 de minimis may have interesting consequences for the fast fashion industry.
However, just under 8,000km away from India, in the South African country of Lesotho, a clear picture of the human toll is already forming.
Like India, Lesotho relies heavily on exports to the United States – particularly on textiles, including production for major brands such as Levi’s and Calvin Klein – reportedly adding up to $237 million USD in 2024. Reuters suggests that this number is more than a tenth of the country’s GDP, which in 2023 was $916 USD per capita according to the World Bank, making Lesotho one of the world’s poorest countries and therefore most vulnerable.
Known as Africa’s capital of denim, Maseru now bears the scars of an all-out economic war: where, only earlier this year, factories had once employed local women en masse and provided stability to an entire community.
With tariffs of 50% we now see those same women stranded at the gates of darkened factories, their Chinese and Taiwanese owners thousands of miles away and unforthcoming in terms of an explanation.
Regardless, the truth – that they are the collateral damage of an attempt to bring the manufacturing of ubiquitous “American” brands back to the United States – seems less than satisfactory when both livelihoods and lives are now in jeopardy.
Previously, a monthly wage of roughly 3,000 rand ($168 USD) paid to a single worker had not only supported that employee but had sent that same worker’s 12-year-old daughter to school while also paying for vital medication for an elderly relative.
This, of course, is just one of thousands of similar stories from garment workers in Lesotho who deserve better than to be fodder in Trump’s war on offshore manufacturing.
And, of course, the African country is far from the only casualty: Bangladesh, which exports close to $9 billion USD of apparel to the states each year, and Haiti, which sends 99% of its exported apparel to the US, have both been hit hard.
In almost all cases, it is female factory workers who are bearing the brunt of this damage.
The total wipeout of a once-thriving industry in Lesotho, then, should stand as a stark warning and portend for what is likely to happen elsewhere as a result of Trump’s swinging tariffs.
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi this week relayed a message of necessary self-sufficiency to his country in the face of a catastrophic collapse in exports, but it’s hard to see how even the most successful project on that front could prop up an industry the scale of India’s garment network. A network, much like in Lesotho, held up almost entirely by the labour of women.
If manufacturing is sent into freefall across the less economically developed world, it’s vulnerable people – women above all – who will go tumbling with it, rather than those at the top. There must be a plan to stop this – or at least to break the fall.