Agricultural regulation data for East Africa

Agricultural regulation data for East Africa: gazette notices, bills, standards and border rejections

Typed, citable signals pulled every week from the East African legal record: gazette notices with commencement dates, bills with their stage, standards notified to the trade body before they apply, border rejections naming a product and a country, and acts as they appear in the law reports. 1 dataset, 18 fields.

Catalogue group: Regulatory & legal, market data. What the law is about to require, while there is still time to act.

The dataset in regulatory & legal

publishedthe row's timestamp
comment deadlinea field on the row
effective datea field on the row

status moves under_consultation → passed → in force as a field that changes on re-extraction. Query by publication window, then read the dates. A row per country the instrument applies to.

5 kinds of legal source

Source tag	Record	Yield
`gazette`	The national gazette, issue by issue	Notices with commencement dates: levies, subsidy rules, board appointments, import and export orders
`bills`	The parliamentary tracker for both houses, about 50 agriculture bills	Bills in progress with house and stage
`eping`	Sanitary, phytosanitary and technical-barrier notifications filed with the trade body, filtered to East African relevance	Standards notified before they apply, with the notifying member and the comment deadline
`rasff`	The European rapid alert system for food and feed	Border rejections naming origin and reason: pesticide residues in green beans from Kenya, aflatoxin in peanuts from Uganda
`lii`	The law reports of Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda	Acts and regulations as published, with instrument name and reference

Every signal carries confidence, status, the instrument, a document reference, the obligation it creates for a farmer or exporter across the 4 countries, a verbatim quote and a link straight to the document.

Publication, deadline and commencement dates

The signal’s own timestamp is always the publication date, never the effective date. The effective date, the comment deadline and the status live as their own fields instead, so a rule commencing next year gets stamped when it was published and its commencement read separately off that field. A notification that applies across several of the 4 countries is stored once per country, which means a country filter is complete entirely on its own.

Relationship to the news layer

The news signals read what the press says about a rule; this layer reads the rule itself. A subsidy announced in a speech reaches the news layer the same day, while the gazette notice that creates it, commencement date and all, only reaches this layer the following Saturday. Both stay keyed to the same country and commodity vocabulary throughout.

Coverage since August 2026

The layer has run weekly since August 2026, which makes it a current-awareness feed rather than a legal archive going further back. A signal’s confidence tracks how much of the operative text the document contained, so a notification missing its annex scores low and the summary says exactly why. This is a citation-backed reading of the record, not legal advice, and every single signal links straight back to its document.