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Reviewing Agricultural Trade Policies

To Promote Intra-OIC Agricultural Trade

119

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.