The party sets out its supply-side response to rising household costs and outlines the structural measures it will pursue.
The Unite Movement notes with grave concern the continued increase in household costs reported in this month's basic-basket survey. Families are spending a larger share of household income on staples than at any point in the last decade, and the policy response from the present government has been thin and reactive.
Diagnosis
The cost-of-living problem in the Gambia is structural, not cyclical. It is being driven by three things: import-dependence on staples that could be produced locally with better support, currency volatility that small businesses cannot hedge against, and a regulatory regime around the port that adds avoidable cost to every container that lands.
Short-term subsidies, however well-intentioned, do not fix any of these. They paper over them — usually until the budget runs out, at which point prices spike again.
Our response
Our response is supply-side. First, a rice self-sufficiency programme that combines targeted irrigation investment with a guaranteed minimum price for domestic producers, phased in over four years. Second, a port reform package that reduces the per-container clearance time from days to hours through a single-window customs portal — work the World Bank has costed, and which has been approved twice and shelved twice. Third, a structural reform of the central bank's reserve management to reduce the cost of currency volatility for small importers.
Subsidies treat symptoms. We are committed to treating causes — and publishing the numbers as we go.
What we are not saying
We are not promising overnight relief. Anyone promising that is selling something. The structural fixes above will reduce household costs over a 24-to-36-month horizon, not next quarter.
What we will commit to is publishing the basic-basket index quarterly, with our own response to it, line by line. If the index moves the wrong way, we will say so. If it moves the right way, we will tell you why. Accountability runs in both directions.
Press contact
For follow-up on this statement, members of the press should contact the secretariat through the press office channel. The party's policy team is available for technical briefings on any of the three programmes referenced above.