Amadou Samba: Gambia's Groundnut Industry Lives

For Amadou Samba, Gambia’s groundnut industry bears many similarities to a phoenix that has risen from its ashes. State counsel turned businessman, Mr. Samba uses his excellent chamber work and representation, operational expertise, and powerful fiscal stride to turn sputtering old barges of enterprise into smooth-running, high profit ocean liners. The transformations that effected the revival of Gambia’s groundnut production are not unlike the many overhauls that Mr. Samba has had to manage in order to resuscitate some of his less than booming businesses.

Gambia’s groundnut industry plummeted due to several factors. Once selling the country’s biggest cash crop, the sector died of gross mismanagement. Amadou Samba saw Gambia’s groundnut estate fall to pieces at the turn of the millennium, from erratic rainfall, seed shortages, and a faulty marketing system allowing crops to be bought on credit and groundnut farmers to go for months unpaid.

By 2007, bank loans for buying seeds, fertilizers, and tools for growing groundnuts had gotten harder to grant. Farmers fled their posts by the hundreds. “Many of the farmers in the region have to pull their children from school while they wait to be paid,” shares Lamin Sanno, a former groundnut farmer from Bantungding village.

During the government’s intervention in 2008, the first order of business was abolishing the practice of credit-buying as government-built Gambia Groundnut Corporation set out to sell groundnuts strictly for cash.

Next, as local demand for the product shrank and end-season surplus grew, producers were moving points-of-sale across the border. Lines of export for the crop were rebuilt, strengthened, and promoted.

Today, with a $14 million financing grant from Saudi Arabia’s International Islamic Trade Finance Corporation in the procurement of groundnuts, Gambia’s erstwhile industrial failure is slowly getting back its crunch.
More information on Amadou Samba can be seen at gambia.gtbank.com/amadou_samba.