{"id":949,"date":"2008-05-30T07:16:34","date_gmt":"2008-05-30T06:16:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=949"},"modified":"2008-05-30T07:16:34","modified_gmt":"2008-05-30T06:16:34","slug":"forgotten-world-135-the-gambia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=949","title":{"rendered":"Forgotten World (135): The Gambia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gambia\">The Gambia<\/a> is the smallest country in mainland Africa with a size of only 4,361 sq miles and a population of a mere 1.7 million. Unlike many of its West African neighbours, it has enjoyed long spells of stability since independence from Britain in 1965. President Yahya Jammeh seized power in a bloodless coup in 1994 as a young army lieutenant and has ruled the country with an iron fist ever since, winning three widely criticised multi-party elections.<br \/>\nHowever, stability has not translated into prosperity. Despite the presence of the Gambia river, which runs through the middle of the country, only one-sixth of the land is arable and poor soil quality has led to the predominance of one crop &#8211; peanuts. This has made The Gambia heavily dependent on peanut exports and a hostage to fluctuations in the production and world prices of the crop. Consequently, the country relies on foreign aid to fill gaps in its balance of payments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Gambia is the smallest country in mainland Africa with a size of only 4,361 sq miles and a population of a mere 1.7 million. Unlike many of its West African neighbours, it has enjoyed long spells of stability since independence from Britain in 1965. President Yahya Jammeh seized power in a bloodless coup in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/949\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}