By Abdoulie Jallow
As the world marks World Food Safety Day under the theme “From Burden to Solutions — Safe Food Everywhere,” The Gambia has particular cause for reflection. This is not merely because the country is observing an international day, but because its economic survival, rural dignity, and long-term prosperity are inseparable from how seriously it treats food safety.
For many countries, food safety is framed primarily as a public health matter, focused on preventing illness, protecting consumers, and building confidence in health systems. These are legitimate and important concerns. But in The Gambia, and in many smallholder-dependent economies across sub-Saharan Africa, the food safety conversation must go further. It must be understood as an economic imperative: a matter of livelihoods, market access, export competitiveness, and ultimately, national prosperity.
The groundnut lesson we cannot afford to ignore
Nothing illustrates this more painfully than what aflatoxin contamination has done to The Gambia’s groundnut sector. Groundnuts were once the backbone of this nation’s economy. For generations, smallholder farmers cultivated and harvested groundnuts not just to feed their families, but to earn income, invest in their children’s education, and participate in national development. The groundnut value chain connected rural villages to processing facilities, export markets, and foreign exchange earnings. It was, in the truest sense, a prosperity chain.
Then aflatoxins — naturally occurring mycotoxins produced by Aspergillus molds under favourable conditions for mold growth and poor post-harvest handling — began systematically undermining that chain. This coincided with the enforcement of strict aflatoxin control regulations in the most important Gambian groundnut export destination, the EU. In fact, upon the introduction of the most stringent limits, far below the established Codex limits, groundnut shipments from West Africa to the EU were reduced by 64%, leading to repeated rejections in European and other international markets, where regulatory limits are strictly enforced under Sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) standards.
Of course, the demise of the Gambian groundnut value chain cannot be pinned entirely on aflatoxin levels; policy missteps also contributed to the decline of what was once the golden cow of rural Gambia.
What is critical to understand is that this is not simply a food safety problem. It is an economic catastrophe with human faces. Farmers who could not sell their harvests, cooperative processing facilities (seccos) that sat idle, traders who lost creditworthiness, and a government whose foreign exchange reserves dwindled all felt the effects. In fact, it can be directly linked to one of our greatest societal challenges: migration. So it is not an exaggeration to say that aflatoxin did not just contaminate groundnuts in The Gambia; it contaminated livelihoods.
And the harder truth must also be said: despite years of donor programmes, technical assistance, awareness campaigns, and institutional efforts, The Gambia has been unable to bring aflatoxin contamination in groundnuts under the control required to restore consistent access to premium international markets. This is not a failure of intent. It reflects the profound structural difficulty of managing a systemic food safety hazard across informalised and fragmented smallholder systems, in conditions of climate stress, with limited laboratory infrastructure and limited agricultural extension services. But it is a sobering lesson nonetheless.
Food safety problems left unresolved do not wait — they compound, and eventually they foreclose options entirely. The groundnut sector’s decline is, in many ways, a cautionary tale about what happens when a nation’s most important value chain loses the food safety battle. It is a loss this country cannot afford to repeat.
The human cost: A fungal metabolite that empties villages
The consequences of groundnut’s decline did not remain confined to trade statistics. They entered the demographic fabric of the country itself. As groundnut farming became progressively less rewarding, rural households across the groundnut-growing communities that have historically depended on it faced a stark calculation: stay and struggle, or leave and try elsewhere. For many, particularly young men who had grown up watching their fathers work the land for diminishing returns, the answer was simple: leave.
The connection between aflatoxin-driven uncompetitiveness and rural-urban migration in The Gambia is not often made explicit in food safety discourse, but it is real and consequential. When a cash crop loses its market viability, the rural economy built around it does not simply contract; it is disrupted from within. Labour leaves. Young people who might have become the next generation of farmers, processors, and rural entrepreneurs instead head to Banjul, to Serekunda, and in far too many cases, to the desperate and dangerous irregular migration routes that have claimed young Gambian lives in the Sahara and in the Mediterranean.
So, food safety, in this light, is not just a public health or trade issue. It is a migration issue. The groundnut sector’s decline is, in this fuller sense, a cautionary tale of national proportions. It is a loss this country cannot afford to repeat.
A lesson from South America
If The Gambia’s groundnut story is a cautionary tale, Argentina’s is the counter-narrative: a demonstration of what becomes possible when investments in food safety are made.
Argentina is today the dominant supplier of groundnuts to the European market. This is not an accident of geography or climate. Argentina’s agro-climatic conditions present their own aflatoxin challenges. What Argentina did, systematically and with long-term resolve, was build a sector-tailored quality infrastructure that allowed it to win and hold the EU market on its own terms.
The centrepiece of Argentina’s strategy was investment in aflatoxin mitigation technologies at industrial scale. Chief among these is blanching — a heat treatment process that removes the skin of the groundnut kernel and, critically, eliminates a significant proportion of aflatoxin contamination concentrated in and around the seed coat. When combined with technologically advanced optical and electronic sorting technologies that detect and remove discoloured kernels, blanching transforms the contamination risk profile of a groundnut consignment to one of low risk.
But processing technology alone does not explain Argentina’s dominance. Equally critical was investment in quality infrastructure — the interlocking system of metrology, standards, testing, inspection, and certification that underpins regulatory compliance. Argentina built laboratories capable of detecting aflatoxins at the low parts-per-billion levels required by EU regulations, and, crucially, those laboratories operate under accreditation frameworks that European buyers and regulators trust.
The lesson for The Gambia is both humbling and instructive. The EU groundnut market that Argentina now dominates was once more accessible to West African exporters, including Gambian and Senegalese producers who had long-standing colonial-era trade relationships with European buyers. The progressive loss of that market share did not happen because European consumers stopped eating our groundnuts, or because West African groundnuts became inherently inferior. It happened because our aflatoxin mitigation measures did not work.
The Gambia cannot reclaim its former position in the EU groundnut market. That window, for now, has largely closed, and we must move on. But the Argentine example speaks directly to the cashew opportunity that sits before this country today. The same logic applies: value chain-specific investments.
Cashew: A second chance that must not be squandered
In the shadow of groundnut’s decline, cashew has emerged as The Gambia’s most promising agricultural export commodity and, increasingly, as the primary cash crop for rural households across the country. Cashew production has grown substantially over the past decade, with smallholder farmers turning to it as a more reliable source of seasonal income. Export volumes have risen, and the crop now represents a significant share of agricultural foreign exchange earnings. This is an opportunity, but it is not a guarantee.
The cashew sector carries immense potential: strong global demand, relatively favourable agro-climatic conditions in The Gambia, and a growing base of producer experience. But unrealized potential becomes vulnerability. The Gambia has the chance to build the cashew value chain correctly by embedding food safety, quality standards, and traceability from the outset rather than attempting costly retrofitting after problems have already emerged.
That means investing now in post-harvest handling practices that preserve quality, in grading and sorting infrastructure that allows Gambian cashew to command fair prices in international markets, and in compliance systems that can demonstrate conformity with the SPS requirements of importing countries. We also must pay attention to new emerging sustainability standards that may appear attractive but could represent another market-access hurdle we must address.
The story of groundnut must serve as a direct warning here. The Gambia cannot afford a second generation of rural farmers watching their primary cash crop lose its market value because the quality infrastructure architecture was not built around it. More than an agricultural commodity, cashew represents a generational opportunity for rural prosperity, and quality infrastructure is the foundation upon which that opportunity either stands or collapses.
From Burden to Solutions: Where Investment Must Go
The 2026 World Food Safety Day theme is a call to action, and The Gambia must answer it with strategic clarity. Argentina’s story must be The Gambia’s blueprint. The value chain-targeted investment horizon is not one or two years — it is a decade of sustained, coordinated commitment to building the processing capability, quality infrastructure, and credibility that transforms the country from a commodity exporter into a quality-assured supplier.
The ultimate ambition of value chain-targeted food safety investment is not merely to prevent rejection; it is to build the kind of verified, credible, market-recognized food safety reputation that transforms The Gambia from a price-taker into a value-creator. Argentina did not become the EU’s dominant groundnut supplier by accident. It did so through exactly this kind of sustained, value chain-specific investment, executed over years with institutional consistency and political will. The Gambia must chart the same course for cashew — before a competitor claims the ground that Gambian farmers are standing on today.
The groundnut experience showed us, at great cost, what happens when a nation’s most important value chain is unable to produce products that meet market standards. Market access narrows. Rural incomes fall. Communities that once hummed with agricultural activity grow quiet as their young people leave for urban centres, some to precarious informal economies, and some, tragically, to the dreaded backway in pursuit of a future to rely on.
Safe food is not separate from prosperity. In The Gambia, it is the foundation of it.
The author is a food safety practitioner, trade enthusiast and a Chevening Scholar.
