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The Haute Casamance is an outlying area of Senegal benefitting from an extraordinary income due to its situation at the cross-roads of three countries with different monetary and economic policies: Gambia, Guinea Bissau and Guinea Conakry. The chronic shortages of food and the enormous needs of the areas at the periphery of the Guinean states engaged in a civil war favoured in the 1970s the emergence of weekly markets, the loumo, in the South of Senegal, in parallel with the existing trade system organised by the jula for generations. Following independence in Guinea Bissau and liberalisation of the Guinea Conakry economy, trans-border commercial trade intensified and diversified, and developed further in the 1980s, as a resuit of the limitation of Senegal’s territorial hold and of the State disengagement from the economy. A large proportion of local villagers make a living from small trading and trans-border fraud, but the merchants who control imports and the transport of merchandise are not from the region and do not invest their profits there. This situation makes it difficult to take advantage of the potential offered by the loumo to structure a trading area in this region weakly urbanised and ill connected to the national supply networks. New outlets for agricultural products do not encourage Casamance agriculture to diversify production in front of the compeition from products originating from Guinean and Sahelian regions, for which trading networks are better organised.