In the heart of southern India’s centuries-old textile industry, tens of millions of garment workers spin cotton fibers into yarn each year.

They then dye large swaths of that yarn a dusty indigo hue before weaving it into a denim fabric that will eventually be cut and sewn into your favorite pair of light-washed low-rise jeans. They’re the kind that fit in that particular way so that you too can look like a member of the girl group Katseye, decked out in Gap denim at a cost of $90 apiece. Made in India.

But after President Donald Trump’s 50 percent tariff on Indian goods went into effect this August, those $90 jeans effectively now have to pay a $45 toll just to get into the United States.

That is, if India — the world’s second-largest textile manufacturer — gets to make them at all.

The export-heavy factories once bustling across the country’s textile belt have all but come to a standstill since tariffs took hold. Garment workers have been rationing their shifts. And suicide rates are rising among the cotton farmers who supply the factories with raw materials — as a result, thousands of farmers have taken to the streets to protest their government’s tariff response.

Trump’s slate of double-digit export fees has battered global supply chains across a map that seems to be all but gerrymandered against the global poor. The tariffs aren’t just going to raise prices on your favorite Gap jeans, Nike shoes, or Costco Lululemon dupes — they are also poised to threaten decades of progress in countries where exports have collectively lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in recent decades.

“Trump has basically blown up all of the rules of the game,” said Jayati Ghosh, a development economist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Not that those rules were very fair to begin with, she said, but “having some rules is better than having no rules, where the big bully can come and beat you up in the playground.”

There are millions of people whose ability to feed their families and send their kids to school depends on the often meager wages they earn stuffing your Labubus or even assembling your Mercedes-Benz. And in places where global trade has been a major driver of economic growth, these tariffs could reverse decades of substantial but often fragile progress.

Made in India

For decades after gaining independence in 1947, India mostly kept to itself when it came to global trade. For much of the bell-bottomed jeans era, its exports hovered around just 5 percent of its GDP.

Then, in the early ’90s — the original age of baggy jeans and politically tinged celebrity denim ads — India hit a currency crisis that eventually led to short-term financial assistance from the Western-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which helped support a domestically-led opening of India to trade and foreign investment. The “free market” conditions that came with that help remain contentious: the IMF sees them as key to spurring economic growth — and by extension, swift debt repayment — even though they often hurt the country’s poorest, at least in the short term.

By the time jeans got skinny in the mid-2000s, companies like Gap had begun to see India as a promising manufacturing hub. In China, which dominated American clothing manufacturing at the time, wages were rising — meaning $4 to $8 per day. But in India, Gap’s subcontractors could pay workers, some of them children, closer to just $2 per day. That might seem miserly, but it’s worth noting that most low-skilled women workers in India at the time earned under $0.50 per day.

So, as exploitative as those garment industry wages could be, they also unlocked a lot of prosperity for the country and job opportunities for a mostly female workforce.

Over a decade, Indian exports ballooned — at an annual pace of 26 percent in 2006. Today, the country is one of the largest textile manufacturers (second only to China) and the second-largest single cotton producer in the world. Along the way, rates of extreme poverty in India — once home to

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