Guinea-Bissau's currency independence was short-lived. The country issued its own peso from 1975 following independence from Portugal, but chronic fiscal instability and dependence on foreign aid made maintaining a sovereign currency increasingly untenable. By 1997, Guinea-Bissau abandoned the peso entirely and joined the West African CFA franc zone — meaning this FAO issue was struck just two years before the denomination it celebrates ceased to exist.
The FAO coin program funded participating nations' minting costs in exchange for agricultural-themed issues, a arrangement that produced some of the more obscure modern coinage of the late twentieth century.
Guinea-Bissau's currency independence was short-lived. The country issued its own peso from 1975 following independence from Portugal, but chronic fiscal instability and dependence on foreign aid made maintaining a sovereign currency increasingly untenable. By 1997, Guinea-Bissau abandoned the peso entirely and joined the West African CFA franc zone — meaning this FAO issue was struck just two years before the denomination it celebrates ceased to exist.
The FAO coin program funded participating nations' minting costs in exchange for agricultural-themed issues, a arrangement that produced some of the more obscure modern coinage of the late twentieth century.