Tackling The Gambia’s Food Insecurity: Why (Gambian) Mangoes Matter

 Part I – A thought provoking field trip

About 10 days ago I came back from a 3-day field visit to some of The Gambia’s most remote areas of which the purpose was to study the role of food markets and the trade in cereals on the country’s overall food security prospects. The mission was organized jointly by WFP and the Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS-NET) and included interviews and key informant surveys with importers, wholesalers and many local retailers of rice and coarse grains in different markets throughout the country. 

One of the objectives of the exercise was to ‘close’ the methodological gap in the understanding of the determinants to food (in)security by looking beyond the producers and consumers of cereals as actors solely determining food supply or food demand. Instead, the accent would be put on those actors ‘in-between’ who also exert some influence on the availability, access and final price of staple foods – the traders (of cereals).

Now, in sum, the exercise was very productive and informative and it definitely enhanced my understanding of this important aspect of the food security equation. However, the ‘food for thought’ I took with me home was actually based on some little related side-observations and provoked with me a rather different set of thoughts on how the food security status of the Gambian people might be improved in the future.

In the argumentation that will follow week by week in a series of articles on The Gambia’s food security equation I will not be trying to reinvent the wheel again by covering areas maybe already covered in the past. However, I do think that based on a concrete example from field observations a fresh look at some obvious facts, economic principles and common sense would be pertinent to serve as a reminder on how else can we also think about solving the food security problems in The Gambia, virtually by trying to think out of the box.

As this is aimed to be an interactive series of articles, hopefully to be finished before Christmas, the first hint that I will leave to the millions of excited and highly interested readers of this weblog world wide is that it will be a story of the Gambian mango. Any idea why?

As I said, a thought-provoking exercise. To be continued…

p.s. to all interested fans: will be going tomorrow for a 6 day IR-EMOP break ya neck marathon distribution to 4 different regions and 12 distribution points...hope this time I will not have to write a blog with the title "CORRUPTION LIVE - THE OTHER RENEGADES" even though we will be visiting the same 'diversion' prone region X again. In any case we will be now more attentive than ever.