Lesotho was slapped with the White House's highest tariff rates in the list released by US President Donald Trump on Wednesday. Americans bringing goods in from the small southern African country will have to pay an additional 50% import tax.

Lesotho, which Trump had ridiculed in March as a country "nobody has ever heard of", is a poor country with a GDP of just over $2 billion.

Lesotho scrambled to put together a delegation on Friday to head to Washington to engage with the United States on tariffs that risk wiping out nearly half of its exports, its trade minister said, in what could be a death blow to its economy.