When Rita Gurung was a graduate student in India, she witnessed her male friends finding paid research fieldwork positions and wondered what cultural assumptions about women’s aptitude or suitability for fieldwork were limiting her access to these opportunities.

“Professors and project leaders routinely excluded female students from fieldwork because they thought they couldn’t safely send the women alone in rural areas or that their efficiency would not be on the same level as the men,” said Gurung.

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Nepal’s government is promoting the production and consumption of fresh produce to alleviate food and nutritional insecurity in the country. However, inadequate food safety practices can jeopardize the intended benefits of eating more nutrient-dense fruits and vegetables. To promote the adoption of food safety practices within Nepal’s fresh produce systems, a project funded by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety (FSIL) recently trained more than 240 farmers and extension workers through five produce safety workshops held in produce hubs across the country.

“Food safety is an emerging issue in government policy, but stakeholders in fresh produce systems still have low awareness,” said Aditya Khanal, associate professor in the Department of Agricultural Business and Education in the College of Agriculture at Tennessee State University and leader of the project Market-led food safety in Nepal: Harnessing production incentives and consumer awareness. “Awareness among stakeholders involved in fresh produce systems – such as growing, handling, and consuming the fresh produce – is highly important.”

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Researchers from Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Senegal sponsored by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety (FSIL) converged at the International Association for Food Protection 17th Dubai International Food Safety Conference. The gathering of more than 3,000 experts from local, regional, and international organizations provided the team with opportunities to share their work, expand their professional network, and learn about the latest advancements in food safety.

FSIL-sponsored researchers in attendance included Shahida Akhter D.V.M., a Ph.D. fellow at Bangladesh Agricultural University; Md. Farid Dewan, a Ph.D. Fellow at Bangladesh Agricultural University and Assistant Professor at Noakhali Science and Technology University; Maroky Diedhiou, an agricultural engineer at Senegal’s National Higher School of Agriculture of Thiès; and Dr. Nkem Torimiro, an Associate Professor and research scientist at Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria.

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Photo Credit: Kathacharya Productions

A splash of irrigation water in a field, a rinse at the market, a thorough wash of salad vegetables before a meal: all three are moments when water contaminated with foodborne pathogens can turn nutrient-rich produce into a vehicle for foodborne illness. A nationwide study of contamination in the water sources used by growers, vendors and consumers in Nepal underscores the pressing need for policies and programs to increase the safety of water used in Nepal’s food systems.

“It is important for dietary diversity and nutrition to consume fresh produce, but raw produce poses a risk of foodborne illnesses,” said lead author Aditya Khanal, associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at Tennessee State University. “Identifying barriers to fresh produce safety, such as water quality, can inform policies and investments to reduce foodborne illness.”

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Dissemination of research results is a pathway to impact, and findings published in an English-language journal can reach a global audience. Publishing can be especially challenging, however, for researchers who aren’t fluent in English or are new to the peer-review process. A project funded by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety recently held a scientific writing workshop specifically designed to support Cambodian students in communicating their research.

“If your target audience is local, you can choose a journal that uses the local language, but the ones published in English have a broader audience, so publishing your article in a journal written in English provides you the opportunity to reach more people,” said Ellen Mendez, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Animal Sciences and Industry at Kansas State University. “It all depends on the objectives of the research and who you want to reach with the publication.”

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Vegetables play a key role in the Cambodian diet, but these nutrient-dense foods are also a common source of foodborne illness. Farms and informal markets, one of the main sources of produce for many Cambodians, are key points for preventing contamination with foodborne pathogens. To develop tailored outreach programs to promote the adoption of new food safety practices, researchers funded by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety (FSIL) conducted surveys to better understand current perceptions about foodborne illness — including its health impacts and where contamination occurs — among growers and vendors working with informal vegetable markets. They identified crucial gaps in knowledge about microbial food safety risks and health impacts.

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For graduate students specializing in food safety, their thesis work typically revolves around a specific product, value chain or pathogen. Attending international conferences is a valuable way for young scholars to gain a more comprehensive understanding of global food safety challenges and explore cutting-edge approaches. To provide this opportunity for international students working on FSIL projects, FSIL sponsored students from Cambodia, Nepal and Kenya to attend the 2023 annual International Association for Food Protection (IAFP) conference in Toronto, Canada, from July 16-19.

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Dr. Jocelyn Boiteau is a postdoctoral associate with the Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition (TCI). A registered dietitian, she conducted doctoral work measuring food loss and waste along tomato value chains in South India. With TCI Founding Director, Dr. Prabhu Pingali, she is writing a book on food loss and waste that considers qualitative aspects of food loss and waste — including food quality losses that impact nutrition — in low- and middle-income countries along the continuum of traditional, mixed and modern food systems. We asked her to share her insights on food loss and waste as it pertains to food quality loss and food safety.

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From informing an experiment’s design and analyzing data to interpreting results and informing decision-making, statistics ensure that research outcomes are both sound and publishable. Because statistics expertise is a key part of strengthening agricultural research capacity, researchers with the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety (FSIL) recently held an intensive, week-long agricultural statistics course at Cambodia’s Center of Excellence for Sustainable Agricultural Intensification and Nutrition (CE SAIN) at the Royal University of Agriculture in Phnom Penh.

The course was taught by Dr. Nora Bello, professor of systems modeling in the Department of Animal Sciences at The Ohio State University and co-principal investigator (PI) of a FSIL-funded, Cambodian-led research project to reduce foodborne pathogens in nutritious, but highly perishable, salad vegetables in Cambodia. Through this project and others, Bello recognized that Cambodia’s surging research capacity had created a need for more advanced statistics training.

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Strengthening food safety is ultimately about behavior change, which can be bolstered by motivation and stymied by obstacles. To develop effective outreach programs in Cambodia informed by behavior change theory, researchers funded by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety (FSIL) conducted a survey that revealed relatively higher motivation to implement a food safety behavior — but lower perceived opportunity — among produce farmers, distributors and vendors.

“In Cambodia, the produce sold in informal vegetable markets comes from farms via distributors, and preventing contamination with foodborne pathogens is important at every step,” said lead author Sabrina Mosimann, who participated in the research as part of her master’s degree in Animal Sciences at Purdue University. “If you want to encourage someone to adopt a food safety practice, whether or not they know how to do it is one thing. Our goal was to figure out whether or not people thought they could do it, whether they felt they had the opportunity to do it and whether they felt like, ‘Oh, this would motivate me to do it’.”

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