Reviewing Agricultural Trade Policies
To Promote Intra-OIC Agricultural Trade
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4.3.2. Agricultural Trade Policies in the Gambia
Background
The Gambia has an open trade and investment regime since the Trade Policy Regime in 2010.
The main trade policy reform has been the adoption of the ECOWAS Common External Tariff
(CET) from January 1, 2017 (WTO, 2017a).
The sub-sectoral policies of agricultural production, marketing and trade along with
institutional arrangements and creation of agricultural strategy documents dates back to the
colonial efforts of the late 1940s. Since then, many policy documents were created in order to
implement and create a productive agricultural sector in The Gambia. The Government of The
Gambia, in parallel to vision 2020 that was developed in 1996 created agricultural position
papers and strategy documents, most of which ended in 2016. The Gambia incorporated the
Vision 2020 in 1996 to guide the country towards the goal of a middle income, export oriented
country. The 1996 National vision defined the long-term objectives and adopted Bretton-Woods
institutions sponsored Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) in place of its Strategy for
Poverty Alleviation (SPA) (The Republic of the Gambia, 2017).
Since then, The Government of The Gambia created major policy papers, including Agriculture
and Natural Resource Policy (ANRP) (2009-2015), The Gambia National Agricultural
Investment Program (GNAIP) (2011-2015), Ministry of Agriculture Strategic Plan (MoASP)
(2010-2014), Programme for Accelerated Growth and Employment (PAGE) (2012-2016)
(African Development Bank, 2017).
The policies above are now replaced by new ones covering the period 2017-2025 under the
National Development Plan (NDP) currently led by the Ministry of Finance. The Agricultural and
Natural Resources (ANR) Policy (2017-2026) of The Republic of The Gambia aims for a favorable
environment for agricultural producers with an objective of maximizing poverty reduction. The
vision is a market led commercialized, efficient competitive, dynamic ANR in the context of
sustainable development.
Tariffs
The tariff data are available for limited number of years for Gambian agricultural products. The
import tariffs that are implemented by The Gambia for their top five import products from their
top OIC exporters are high for oils, fats, waxes; miscellaneous products and coffee, tea, cocoa,
spices. The tariffs have been at high levels for the last three years. Gambia has relatively low
tariff rates for cereals and dairy, with probable reason that the products are key for nutrition,
particularly rice being a major staple product of The Gambia. Exports are no exception with
regards to high tariff rates. The Gambia faces high tariff rates for their top five export products
for their top five agricultural OIC-country importers (Table 4.32 and Table 4.33).
Tables 4.34 and 4.35 summarize the role of NTMs in The Gambia’s agricultural trade. In the
former table, NTM types and product shares and counts affected from NTMs are shown. Food
products is the main product category that is being affected from the existence of NTMs, where
more than half of food imports are subject to NTMs. Half of the products in the animal category
and vegetable category are impacted by NTMs.