50 Dobras FAO

The FAO coin program, launched in the 1960s, commissioned member nations to issue circulating coinage bearing agricultural themes as a form of development messaging — São Tomé e Príncipe participated across several decades, using the series partly to signal institutional legitimacy for a central bank established only after independence from Portugal in 1975. By 1990, the islands were navigating a transition from single-party socialist rule toward multiparty democracy, a shift formalized the following year.