Gambian food safety and agricultural stakeholders met on Monday, March 20, 2023 in a bid to strengthen, promote, protect and improve the health of the country’s animal and animal products.
The first meeting of the National Sanitary and Phytosanitary Committee organised by the Food Safety and Quality Authority (FSQA) in collaboration with the GIRAV project coordination unit, wants to ensure that Gambian animal products meet international standards and are able to penetrate international markets.
The Gambia Inclusive and Resilient Agricultural Value Chain Development Project (GIRAV), a five-year project financed by the World Bank at the tune of US$40 million, is currently being implemented in all the seven agricultural regions of the country. It is intended to increase private sector investment in agribusiness and involvement in agricultural value chains including production, processing, marketing, and service delivery.
Monday’s meeting set in motion renewed commitment from the stakeholders to ensure that the country’s animal and animal products are protected against diseases.
Mamodou Bah, Director General of FSQA, said that in order to ensure trade in animal and animal products flourishes, there has to be guarantees of quality of products that meet international standards.
He said that with the surge in agribusiness, Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) measures are a cornerstone in ensuring that agricultural products are of national and international standards, which avails them the key to penetrating the international and world markets.
Sanitary (human and animal health) and phytosanitary (plant health) measures apply to domestically produced food or local animal and plant diseases, as well as to products coming from other countries.
Dr. Abdou Ceesay, the Director General of the Department of Livestock Service (DLS), said “SPS measures are designed to protect and safeguard our national food resources (for both animals and plants) as well as humans from health risks.”
“The Gambia, like many countries, depends to a larger extent on animal resources for food, and keeping these resources healthy should therefore be a core objective for any country that cares for its population’s health,” he said.
Some of the key elements of SPS measures in relation to animal health are legislation, disease surveillance, control, prevention programmes, management capability, administrative infrastructure, material and human resources among others.
Dr. Ceesay said that knowledge of the health status of the national livestock population is essential for trade in livestock and livestock products which should form the basis for any decision on any disease control efforts, hence the importance of disease surveillance, control and prevention programmes as part of SPS.
Climate change, increase in the movement of people, animals and products of animal origin, means the spread of trans-boundary animal disease is steadily increasing. Thus, the SPS measures will essentially help countries or territories to protect the health of animals.
Momodou Salieu Sowe, an Agribusiness Specialist at GIRAV, said the GIRAV project focuses value chains such as value rice substituting for imports, horticultural products (vegetables and mango) for urban centers and export markets, cashew for domestic processing and export, poultry and poultry feeds and maize for urban centers.
“The project will operate in six agricultural regions and two municipalities, and its development objective is to promote the development of inclusive, resilient and competitive agricultural value chains, focusing on small farmer holders and agribusinesses in project target areas,” he said.
He explained that under component one of the projects which seeks to improve the business environment for commercial agricultural development, they have dedicated a sub-component that seeks to strengthen the quality, sanitary and phytosanitary control system.
Musu K. Ceesay, Principal Economist at the Trade Ministry, said that The Gambia needs to boost the quality of her agricultural and agro-processing produce to match international standards.
“It is no longer acceptable for our exports to get to premium markets in Europe or the United States only to be rejected and sent back to us for not meeting standards and technical regulations,” she said.
She also said that it is no longer acceptable for the country’s exports of groundnuts or cashew to only be fit for animal feed and earning limited revenue when citizens can work together as a country to ensure that they can penetrate premium markets and reap much higher foreign earnings for our exports.
The Trade Ministry has been working closely with the Ministry of Finance and the Gambia Standards Bureau to establish a testing centre in the country to support “our export ambitions” and to create the enabling conducive environment for the Private sector to exploit for rapid industrialization.
“We cannot continue to send our food and feed samples to Senegal for testing and expect to be competitive in the multilateral trading system,” Ceesay said.
“The ongoing rise in economic risks makes it all the more imperative that policy makers build resilience in advance of any forthcoming economic shocks. We need to bolster the resilience of our economies and societies while improving the lives of the people who are most vulnerable,” she said.
Monday’s inaugural meeting of the SPS Committee is financed by the GIRAV project.
