In late May, more than 40 dairy producers and processors gathered in Senegal’s Matam region, some having traveled up to 75 miles or with a child in tow. The participants, part of the country’s rapidly growing yet highly fragmented dairy supply chain, were attending a seminar on food safety fundamentals. It was one of three hosted in Senegal by a dairy safety project funded by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety.

“One of the female group leaders mentioned that they have had many trainings on making products, for example cheese and fermented milk, but this was the first focused on basic hygiene practices such as Good Management Practices and an introduction to sanitation,” said Manpreet Singh, project leader and department head and professor of food science and technology at the University of Georgia. “We adapted our presentations on the spot to make sure we were focusing on cleaning and sanitizing the equipment they have and using the hygiene principles to assure safety of the products that they’re making.”

Workshops were held in the St. Louis, Matam and Louga regions, engaging more than 100 participants in total. In keeping with the extensive participation of women in the dairy value chain, more than 90% of the workshop attendees were women. The workshops marked the first stakeholder outreach by the project, whose goal is to strengthen the safety of dairy and dairy products produced in Senegal. The Georgia-based researchers are partnering with Senegalese colleagues at the Senegalese Institute of Agricultural Research (ISRA), National Nutrition Development Council (CNDN) and Food Technology Institute (ITA) to strengthen local capacity for producing this nutrient-rich, economically important dietary staple.

“Dairy in general is a very perishable product; the shelf life inherently is not that long,” said Singh. “If we don’t implement interventions during processing, we know that dairy products will quickly deteriorate and become a potentially hazardous product due to microorganisms. The major outcome we hope for from this project is to have a safe dairy value chain in Senegal especially for the individual dairy farmers, with greater involvement from women and youth in the dairy value chain from a processed products perspective.”

Senegal’s supply chain of small farms, aggregation sites, artisanal processing facilities and transport from rural areas to urban centers creates challenges for protecting the microbial quality and safety of dairy products. The workshop addressed those challenges with an introduction to microbiology, sanitation and product and process controls, as well as a presentation on gender and youth in the dairy value chain. The focus was on immediate, practical knowledge.

“An attendee commented that the workshop was very informative and provided much needed training, including simple solutions that they can be more attentive to during milk collection and processing,” said Singh. He cited practices such as excluding milk from cows with mastitis, which can introduce a food safety risk, as well as consistent use of refrigeration at aggregation locations where milk is held before transport or processing.

In addition to offering the workshops, the team toured several dairy collection and processing facilities to recruit local partners for research and outreach. They visited mini-dairies and cheese making facilities, including the Mini-Laiterie de Boulal, a female-owned collection and milk pasteurization center. They also met with the Institut Supérieur d’Enseignement Professionnel (ISEP), a training institute which prepares youth to join Senegal’s agricultural workforce.

“From what we observed, the involvement of women in the dairy value chain is extensive, but the involvement of youth is not,” said co-principal investigators, Harshavardhan Thippareddi, the interim associate dean for research, and John Bekkers professor in poultry science at the University of Georgia. “So that’s one thing we will be considering — how to engage more people between the age of 15 and 35.”

Dialogue with stakeholders during the workshops and site visits brought into focus how economic constraints could impact food safety practices. Key technologies, such as refrigeration to slow microbial growth and pasteurization to destroy microbes that cause foodborne illness, not only require reliable access to energy but also increase the cost of production.

“Electricity is expensive. And it requires a financial buffer to pay for the repair or maintenance of food safety technologies or the solar panels to power them,” said Thippareddi. “Currently, some of the dairy producers are still early in their development as businesspeople — they may be extending the practices they used for home dairy production, and scaling up will require developing capacity for planning for contingencies.”

In the coming months, the project will be gathering baseline data on food safety risks in the dairy value chain, assessing which microbial pathogens are present and at what levels. The data will be key to understanding strategically where implementation of interventions could help mitigate food safety risks and informing data-driven food safety policies and practices.

“I think the project has an incredible opportunity to make an immediate impact on the milk production side in terms of hygiene during production,” said Thippareddi. “While we determine what the prevalence is and how to avoid specific problems like brucellosis, for immediate impact in these regions, we can build on these workshops with outreach activities on hygiene during the production side right away.”

Amanda Garris is a communications specialist with the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety.

To boost the nutritional well-being of its population, Cambodia’s government has made a big push to increase the production and consumption of fresh produce throughout the country. For vegetables which are consumed uncooked, such as lettuce, preventing contamination from bacteria that cause foodborne illnesses is a food safety challenge. New research from a team of Cambodia- and U.S.-based scientists shows that distribution centers have a role to play in reducing foodborne illness.

Researchers funded by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety have been analyzing the fresh vegetable distribution chain in Cambodia — from farmers to distribution centers to fresh market sellers — to understand where contamination occurs and identify intervention strategies to strengthen food safety practices.

The team published a survey on vegetable contamination in a major Cambodian fresh vegetable distribution center in the March-April 2022 issue of Food Protection Trends. The researchers from Kansas State University, the University of Georgia and the Royal University of Agriculture in Cambodia measured the presence of indicator microorganisms in tomatoes, lettuce and cucumbers over a six-month period.

While the indicator organisms measured — coliforms and nonpathogenic E. coli — are themselves not likely to cause foodborne illnesses, they are significant because they can be indicative of fecal contamination and potential gaps in hygiene, sanitation and handling practices.

“When we see indicator organisms, it gives us a sign that there is a potential for the presence of a pathogen,” said co-author Carla Schwan, an assistant professor and extension food safety specialist at the University of Georgia.

Indicator organisms were present in 95% of lettuce samples, 84% of cucumber samples and 62% of tomato samples, with the highest levels present in lettuce. Overall, the prevalence of E. coli was lower, but lettuce still carried the highest levels. Their presence suggests that practices at distribution centers will be key for limiting contamination by bacteria that may cause foodborne disease.

“What I find most interesting and significant is that fresh vegetables sold in the distribution center have microbiological contamination, especially generic E. coli, which is considered an indicator for pathogenic E. coli,” said Malyheng Chhoeun, project officer at the Center of Excellence on Sustainable Agricultural Intensification and Nutrition, Royal University of Agriculture. “These are microbial agents of global concern that potentially harm health, causing diarrheal disease as well as affecting the nutrition of consumers who eat the contaminated vegetables.”

This study was a follow-up to a previous project that evaluated the presence of Salmonella on tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers and food preparation and display surfaces in fresh air markets.

“That study really showed us that there was probably some contamination happening before vegetables reached consumers and that we really didn’t have a great understanding for exactly where it was coming from,” said Jessie Vipham, assistant professor in Food Safety and Food Security at Kansas State University.

Schwan noted that the vegetable production chain can be a challenging environment for maintaining food safety, with opportunities to make an impact on the infrastructure and practices available to growers, distributors and vendors. Current and future projects will continue to identify potential contamination points. The project’s ultimate goal is to determine where contamination is occurring most often and then develop targeted practices to reduce contamination at these specific points.

“I think that everyone wants the food they sell or eat to be safe, but there are no formal policies in place, from those in authority or at the community and market level,” said Chhoeun. “Our project is working to collect the data to establish educational programs and appropriate hygiene and sanitation practices and standards in order to reduce the contamination on raw vegetables and secure safer food in the country.”

Christina Frank is a freelance writer with the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic came a host of new concerns for food businesses: Is COVID-19 a foodborne illness? How do we prevent it from spreading at work? Sabina Shrestha, a grocery retail employee worker in Nepal, faced that uncertainty.

However, Shrestha received critical guidance to protect herself, her coworkers and her community through live, online access to food safety experts provided as part of a project funded by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety (FSIL) and led by Martin Wiedmann, professor of food science at Cornell University. Designed to prevent food system disruptions during the pandemic, the project delivered tools and resources to reduce person-to-person COVID-19 transmission in all parts of the food system.

“Virtual office hours helped me understand the necessity to stay isolated and not work in the store if I get infected from COVID-19, [even] though I am asymptomatic,” said Shrestha.

Shrestha was one of 1,000 food industry members, researchers, government officials and consumers in Africa and Southeast Asia who attended the online COVID-19 food safety office hours. The office hours were hosted by members of a newly developed international task force mentored by food safety experts at the Institute for Food Safety at Cornell (IFS@CU). The 19 sessions, held over six months, provided science-based information on COVID-19 and protocols to reduce transmission in food businesses and address industry questions that ranged from the vaccine to the application of non-food-grade sanitizers to foods.

Among the more than 200 questions answered through the sessions, one question came up again and again: Is COVID-19 foodborne? While there was no evidence of COVID-19 transmission through food, misinformation about using bleach, disinfectants or other chemicals to treat produce spawned new food safety risks.

“The experience of attending the virtual meeting on food industry in the time of corona helped my business,” said Manisha Maharjan, an employee at Twakka, a pickle processing business in Kathmandu, Nepal, who had been concerned that produce should be decontaminated before processing. “[W]ashing vegetables with soap or detergent was completely unnecessary.”

Understanding COVID-19 was not foodborne allowed businesses to prioritize actions to reduce transmission. For example, after participation in office hours, Sela Pepper Co., a food processing company in Memot, Cambodia, implemented social distancing in the workplace, temperature checks for workers and frequent meetings to keep COVID-19 symptoms in the forefront of workers’ minds, according to Sela Pepper quality control supervisor, Snguon Lom Orng.

“We received positive feedback from food businesses regarding office hours and translated resources,” said task force member Dr. Jaya Kumar Gurung, executive director of the Nepal Development Research Institute (NDRI). “We gave a clear understanding of myths regarding COVID-19 and helped food businesses a lot to avoid disruptions and in responding to a COVID-19 outbreak at their business.”

The country-specific office hours proved scalable and were expanded to Pan-African and Pan-Asian sessions. In addition to the office hours, Gurung and task force colleagues Dr. Latiful Bari (Bangladesh), Dr. Chay Chim (Cambodia), Dr. George Ooko Abong’ (Kenya) and Dr. Cheikh Ndiaye (Senegal) worked with IFS@CU to create a centralized online hub for reliable, web-based resources. The 25 country-specific resources, in Bangla, French, Khmer, Nepali and Swahili, included food facility COVID-19 strategy checklists, a guide to prioritizing COVID-19 control strategies, food industry frequently asked questions (FAQs) and a guide to handling fresh produce. Video FAQs provided information on the most important COVID-19 transmission pathways and how to reduce person-to-person spread. According to co-principal investigator Aljosa Trmcic, the interaction during office hours was important in the development of online resources.

“We found that office hours were a two-way street: useful information was flowing in both directions,” said Trmcic, an extension associate at Cornell. “We had a chance to hear about the problems and concerns participants were having and were able to directly respond to them with solutions and new online resources.”

Although the project focused primarily on technical, organizational and personnel measures to reduce person-to-person COVID-19 transmission throughout the food system, the project’s scalable approach and network of experts could be mobilized to address future pandemics or natural disasters which threaten the food systems in these and other countries.

“This emergency response project demonstrated the value of mobilizing a global network to address shared food system challenges,” said co-principal investigator Elizabeth Demmings, program coordinator with IFS@CU.

Amanda Garris is a communications specialist with the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety.

Background

In East Africa, foodborne diseases remain a persistent challenge to consumers’ access to safe, nutritious diets, despite decades of investment in food safety projects by donors, governments and nongovernmental organizations in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan. At present, most countries in East Africa have adopted food safety standards, and the East African Community is active in harmonizing standards among its member states. However, the standards remain largely unimplemented and, when implemented, can have unintended negative consequences on food access and livelihoods. In addition, certification programs often do not cover the informal value chains and fresh air markets where the majority of consumers in East Africa buy their food. The purpose of this report is to highlight investment needs for reducing the burden of foodborne disease across the region.

Approach

Funded through the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety, this report analyzes trends and patterns in food safety investments for countries in East Africa from 2010 to 2017. Authors Florence Mutua (International Livestock Research Institute), Delia Grace (International Livestock Research Institute/Natural Resources Institute, University of Greenwich) and Corey Watts (Global Food Safety Partnership/World Bank consultant) drew on the comprehensive database of food safety investments in sub-Saharan Africa compiled by the Global Food Safety Partnership, as well as literature reviews and their own experience researching food safety in the region. The dataset included a total of 59 food safety projects from 19 donors, with information and opinions from 30 key informant interviews. Projects were assessed for their location, duration and focus; success factors (acceptability, feasibility, sustainability, scalability, economic viability and incentive for behavior change) and the type of intervention (technologies, training, information, new processes, organizational arrangements, policymaking/regulations and infrastructure).

Findings

General trends included an increase in overall project numbers and investments over time, with Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda attracting more investment than the other countries. Aflatoxin mitigation and national control systems (labs, training, etc.) were the predominant project themes, and most projects focused on strengthening the food safety of exports but offered little benefit to the informal sectors that supply food to consumers in East Africa. Animal source foods, such as meat, fish and dairy, were addressed in most countries, but fresh produce was not a major food safety focus in any of the countries. In addition, projects prioritized pesticides over the biological hazards which cause orders of magnitude more sickness and death in East Africa. The lack of investment in research on Taenia solium (pork tapeworm) was notable, given the burden of cysticercosis in the region. Food safety policies that promote the formal sector can lead to reduced food access for consumers. The authors offer the following recommendations for future investment in food safety:

• Emphasize the hazards that cause the greatest domestic health burden, especially biological hazards
• Develop and expand disease surveillance systems
• Promote policies that are pro-poor and avoid unintended consequences
• Invest in longer-term projects with rigorous evaluation processes
• Streamline and better implement regulations — replace command and control with coregulation
• Increase the involvement of the private sector in improving food safety
• Investigate the potential of harnessing consumer demand for food safety
• Assess the food safety risks of individual countries to better prioritize needs and increase impact

The full report is available on the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety’s website.

Amanda Garris is a communications specialist with the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety.

Cambodia’s food system is comprised of complex production chains which connect small-scale producers with the informal, fresh air markets where the majority of consumers purchase food. Production chains and markets are fluid and non-uniform, with opportunities during transport, distribution and sale for food to be cross-contaminated with organisms that cause foodborne illness. Although comprehensive statistics on the burden of foodborne illnesses in Cambodia are not available, the high incidence of diarrheal diseases, which are responsible for 6% of childhood mortalities in the country and affect all socioeconomic groups, indicates that strengthening food safety policies and practices could help realize the country’s goal of well-nourished individuals, households and communities.

Approach

Funded through the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety, this analysis describes current food safety initiatives in Cambodia, with an emphasis on efforts funded by or working in concert with USAID. Authors Paul Ebner (Purdue University), Jessie Vipham (Kansas State University) and Lyda Hok (Center of Excellence on Sustainable Agricultural Intensification and Nutrition [CE SAIN], Royal University of Agriculture, Cambodia) conducted reviews of the literature, site visits and informal conversations with government, private sector and academic stakeholders.

Findings

The report highlights the key laws, government ministries, interagency collaborative programs and national initiatives involved in food safety, including the recent assessment of Cambodian health security by the Asian Development Bank; food safety-allied programs, such as infectious disease-focused aid projects; and Cambodian food safety research programs and their current research directions. The authors present a roadmap for closing major data gaps, developing informed policies, linking food sector stakeholders and enhancing food safety communication throughout the country, with an emphasis on the creation of locally-sustained food safety policies and practices. The authors identify the following gaps and opportunities:

• Identifying the causative agents for foodborne disease throughout the country.
• Understanding transmission routes and critical control points to maximize reductions in contamination.
• Implementing practices to reduce Cambodians’ exposure to antibiotic-resistant bacteria through their diets.
• Expanding consumer perceptions of food safety beyond chemical contamination to include the role of microbial pathogens in diarrheal diseases.
• Improving the sanitation practices for foods obtained through informal markets.
• Assessing the impact and efficacy of innovative food safety interventions, including research on consumers’ willingness to adopt and economic impacts.
• Integrating food safety into existing infectious disease programs.

Access the “Food Safety in Cambodia: Current Programs and Opportunities” report.

Amanda Garris is a communications specialist with the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety.

Groundnuts (peanuts) are widely used in Senegalese cuisine and are critical for poverty reduction strategies targeted to rural households. In fact, groundnuts are grown by 52% of Senegalese households in extreme poverty. However, every stage of their production, processing and storage carry a risk of microbial and fungal contamination that can lead to foodborne illnesses. Understanding contamination levels, household awareness of food safety hazards and farmers’ attitudes towards interventions to reduce the risk of foodborne diseases is critical to strengthening food safety in Senegal. In a project funded by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety (FSIL), an interdisciplinary team at Purdue University partnered with the Institut Sénégalais de Recherches Agricoles (ISRA) to quantify chemical and microbial contamination levels in groundnuts that smallholder farmers in Senegal eat, sell and store for seed. Surveys of 250 smallholder farmers in the country’s peanut basin, as well as testing for chemical and microbial pathogens in their stored groundnuts, provided four interesting results.

1. Awareness of foodborne diseases

We found that awareness of foodborne diseases and the pathogens that cause them is still very low in rural Senegal. Only 20% of groundnut producers surveyed knew of aflatoxins, carcinogenic toxins produced by a family of fungi that commonly contaminate groundnuts. In addition, we learned that prior to participating in the study, only 22% knew about the possibility of bacterial contamination of food. Words referring to aflatoxins and specific pathogens such as E. coli and Salmonella do not exist in the local languages in our survey area. Strategies to inform smallholder producers about food safety should therefore be adapted to this context, for example using videos, pictograms or images. This approach will be helpful in reinforcing the importance of food safety not only on their crops but also on other types of food consumed in the household. Increasing awareness of chemical and microbial contamination is critical to creating systemic change in food safety, by incentivizing consumers to pay premiums for safer food and enhancing the willingness of producers to adopt improved planting, drying and storage practices that reduce the risk of contamination in their crops.

2. Chemical contaminants: Aflatoxins

In 87% of groundnut samples, levels of aflatoxins were below the safety threshold set by the European Union — 4 parts per billion (ppb) — however, 8% contained very high levels, above 100 ppb. This suggests that a non-trivial share of farmers had samples exhibiting aflatoxin levels above the EU standard, and that some groundnuts were extremely unsafe for human consumption. To date, it has been shown that for crops susceptible to contamination with aflatoxins, quality and safety can be improved by promoting the use of biocontrol technologies that help control aflatoxins during plant growth, the use of plastic tarps during drying and improved storage.

3. Microbial contaminants: Coliforms and Enterobacteriaceae

The groundnuts sampled contained high levels of coliforms and Enterobacteriaceae:  97% of samples had coliforms above the U.S. limit for groundnuts destined for raw consumption and 94.5% contained Enterobacteriaceae above the same limit (1 log of colony forming units per gram). The health impacts of these high levels of contamination are unknown. Few households reported consuming raw groundnuts (7%), but paste (pâte d’arachide) and powder are commonly used to make sauces to accompany staple foods. Follow-up is needed to determine whether bacteria are sufficiently destroyed during cooking and processing of paste and powder or if they persist in these processed meals and contribute to the incidence of gastrointestinal diseases.

4. Adoption of new technologies: The case of Aflasafe

The biocontrol product Aflasafe can significantly reduce aflatoxins in groundnuts during plant growth. However, very few farmers we interviewed were aware of the technology, even though Senegal is one of six African countries where the product is being commercially promoted. To evaluate the potential for local adoption of this technology, we assessed farmers’ willingness to pay for Aflasafe. At the time of our survey, 65% of participants valued the technology at its current market price or above. Future work will focus on understanding this demand, how it changes over time and if willingness to pay evolves with adoption of the technology within farmers’ social networks.

Next steps

Food systems in sub-Saharan Africa, including in Senegal, face several simultaneous challenges. These systems need to provide safe and nutritious food to a growing population whose consumption patterns are rapidly changing through urbanization and the emergence of a middle class. They also need to abide by international food safety regulations to access international markets and increase lucrative exports. In the coming years, strengthening food safety will require a better understanding of the extent of contamination in foods produced and consumed in Senegal — widespread food surveillance — and the detection of foodborne hazards in different commodities. In the case of groundnuts produced in Senegal, these are essential steps to: (i) take advantage of growing confectionery groundnut markets in Africa and Asia and, in turn, boost rural households’ income and welfare; and (ii) protect local consumers and reduce the health and economic burden of foodborne diseases.

Additionally, rigorous testing of the impact of pre- and post-harvest strategies is needed to improve production practices and increase the safety of crops for food and feed. The COVID-19 pandemic and the large number of foodborne diseases in sub-Saharan Africa have demonstrated the importance of food safety issues. Funding to identify better farming and production practices could accelerate the scaling up of successful approaches and boost food safety, nutrition and rural incomes in Senegal.

Amanda Garris (FSIL) and Yurani Arias-Granada (Purdue University) contributed to this story.

Food businesses and consumers struggling with impacts of COVID-19 in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Kenya, Nepal and Senegal now have access to customized resources, thanks to a mentorship project led by the Institute for Food Safety at Cornell University.

Continue reading on cornell.edu

The first challenge faced by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety’s inaugural project in Cambodia was not one they expected – how to maintain momentum in the face of the coronavirus pandemic and international lockdowns. In response, the Kansas State University–Purdue University–Royal University of Agriculture (RUA) partnership fast-tracked the building of Cambodian food safety expertise and research capacity.

“The partnership that we have with RUA is so critical to our success,” said Jessie Vipham, co-principal investigator (PI) and assistant professor of animal sciences and industry at Kansas State University. “If there is a silver lining to the pandemic’s disruption of our project, it’s that by pivoting to greater reliance on the researchers at the RUA, Cambodia is developing greater capacity in research that benefits public health and nutrition.”

Before the lockdown, the team completed a preliminary assessment of bacterial contamination on vegetables in distribution centers. The centers are essential infrastructure in Cambodia’s food system, connecting vendors with produce to sell to consumers in the country’s ubiquitous open-air markets, but they are also possible sources for cross-contamination. In previous work funded by USAID, Vipham and collaborator Lyda Hok, director of the Center of Excellence on Sustainable Agricultural Intensification and Nutrition (CE SAIN), documented high levels of pathogenic bacteria on vegetables in fresh food markets found in two provinces, Siem Reap and Battambang.

“Food systems are complex, and it is difficult to control foodborne pathogens at all levels, so you need to identify the locations that contribute the most to people coming into contact with a foodborne pathogen,” said Vipham. “This project will enable us to focus on areas where changes in practices can lead to a measurable reduction in the risk of contamination of vegetables that reach the consumers.”

While the team is awaiting final confirmation of results, preliminary data suggest that bacterial contamination was high within the distribution centers, with some seasonal fluctuation. To reduce contamination in downstream markets, distribution centers are a priority for food safety interventions.

“Food safety interventions involve changing behaviors, and behavior changes are generally driven by awareness of the impact of an action,” said Paul Ebner, project co-PI and professor of animal sciences at Purdue. “To design effective interventions, we need a handle on current perceptions of food safety, so we can target those gaps to build greater awareness or greater acceptance for food safety practices.”

When the pandemic prevented Ebner’s team from traveling to Cambodia to lead the survey work, the development of the survey was converted into an experiential learning opportunity in survey design for Hok’s team, culminating in their official third-party certification to conduct research with human subjects.

“As part of the new training, we were able to add a pilot study and validate and revise the survey, and so the process made the survey much more robust,” Ebner said. “We’ve been able to continue working successfully through the pandemic, and it’s entirely because of existing strong relationships between Feed the Future Innovation Labs and the Royal University of Agriculture.”

Amanda Garris is a communications specialist with the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety.

Author: Yurani Arias-Granada, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University

Groundnuts are widely used in Senegalese cuisine and are critical for poverty reduction strategies targeted to rural households. In fact, groundnuts are grown by 52% of households in extreme poverty. However, all stages of their production, processing, and storage carry risk of microbial and fungal contamination that can lead to foodborne illnesses. Understanding contamination levels, household awareness of food safety hazards, and farmers’ attitudes towards interventions to reduce the risk of foodborne diseases is critical to strengthening food safety in Senegal. In a project funded by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety (FSIL), an interdisciplinary team at Purdue University partnered with the Institut Sénégalais de Recherches Agricoles (ISRA) to quantify chemical and microbial contamination levels in groundnuts that smallholder farmers in Senegal eat, sell, and store for seed. Surveys of 250 smallholder farmers in the Peanut Basin and testing for chemical and microbial pathogens in their stored groundnuts provided four interesting results.

Awareness of foodborne diseases

We found that awareness of foodborne diseases and the pathogens that cause them is still very low in rural Senegal. Only 20% of groundnut producers surveyed knew of aflatoxins, carcinogenic toxins produced by a family of fungi that commonly contaminate groundnuts. In addition, we learned that prior to participating in the study, only 22% knew about the possibility of bacterial contamination of food. Words referring to aflatoxins and specific pathogens such as E. coli and Salmonella do not exist in the local languages in our survey area. Strategies to inform smallholder producers about food safety should therefore be adapted to this context, for example using videos, pictograms, or images. This approach will be helpful in reinforcing the importance of food safety not only on their crops but also on other types of food consumed in the household. Increasing awareness of chemical and microbial contamination is critical to creating systemic change in food safety, by incentivizing consumers to pay premiums for safer food and enhancing the willingness of producers to adopt improved planting, drying, and storage practices that reduce the risk of contamination in their crops.

Chemical contaminants: Aflatoxins

In 87% of groundnut samples, levels of aflatoxins were below the safety threshold set by the European Union (4 parts per billion [ppb]), however, 8% contained very high levels, above 100 ppb. This suggests that a non-trivial share of farmers had samples exhibiting aflatoxins levels above the EU standard, and some groundnuts were extremely unsafe for human consumption. To date, it has been shown that for crops susceptible to contamination with aflatoxins, quality and safety can be improved by promoting the use of biocontrol technologies that help control aflatoxins during plant growth, the use of plastic tarps during drying, and improved storage (Bandyopadhyay et al., 2019; Bauchet et al., 2021; Magnan et al., 2019).

Microbial contaminants: Coliforms and Enterobacteriaceae

The groundnuts sampled contained high levels of coliforms and Enterobacteriaceae:  97% of samples had coliforms above the U.S. limit for groundnuts destined for raw consumption and 94.5% contained Enterobacteriaceae above the same limit (1 log of colony forming units per gram). The health impacts of these high levels of contamination are unknown. Few households reported consuming raw groundnuts (7%), but paste (pâte d’arachide) and powder are commonly used to make sauces to accompany staple foods. Follow-up is needed to determine whether bacteria are sufficiently destroyed during cooking and processing of paste and powder or if they persist in these processed meals and contribute to the incidence of gastrointestinal diseases.

Adoption of new technologies: The case of Aflasafe

The biocontrol product Aflasafe can significantly reduce aflatoxins in groundnuts during plant growth . However, very few farmers we interviewed were aware of the technology, even though Senegal is one of six African countries where the product is being commercially promoted. To evaluate the potential for local adoption of this technology, we assessed farmers’ willingness to pay for Aflasafe.  At the time of our survey, 65% of participants valued the technology at its current market price or above. Future work will focus on understanding this demand, how it changes over time, and if willingness to pay evolves with adoption of the technology within farmers’ social networks.

Next steps

Food systems in sub-Saharan Africa, including in Senegal, face several simultaneous challenges. They need to provide safe and nutritious food to a growing population whose consumption patterns are rapidly changing through urbanization and the emergence of a middle class. They also need to abide by international food safety regulations to access international markets and increase lucrative exports. In the coming years, strengthening food safety will require a better understanding of the extent of contamination in foods produced and consumed in Senegal–widespread food surveillance–and the detection of foodborne hazards in different commodities. In the case of groundnuts produced in Senegal, these are essential steps to: (i) take advantage of growing confectionery groundnut markets in Africa and Asia, and in turn, boost rural households’ income and welfare; and (ii) protect local consumers and reduce the health and economic burden of foodborne diseases.

Additionally, rigorous testing of the impact of pre- and post-harvest strategies is needed to improve production practices and increase the safety of crops for food and feed.  The COVID-19 pandemic and the large number of foodborne diseases in sub-Saharan Africa have demonstrated the importance of food safety issues. Funding to identify better farming and production practices could accelerate the scaling up of successful approaches and boost food safety, nutrition, and rural incomes in Senegal.

References

Bandyopadhyay, R., Atehnkeng, J., Ortega-Beltran, A., Akande, A., Falade, T. D. O., & Cotty, P. J. (2019). “Ground-Truthing” Efficacy of Biological Control for Aflatoxin Mitigation in Farmers’ Fields in Nigeria: From Field Trials to Commercial Usage, a 10-Year Study. Frontiers in Microbiology, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2019.02528

Bauchet, J., Prieto, S., & Ricker‐Gilbert, J. (2021). Improved Drying and Storage Practices that Reduce Aflatoxins in Stored Maize: Experimental Evidence from Smallholders in Senegal. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 103, 296–316. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajae.12106

Magnan, N., Hoffmann, V., Garrido, G., Kanyam, F. A., & Opoku, N. (2019). Information, technology, and market rewards: Incentivizing aflatoxin control in Ghana. International Food Policy Research Institute. https://doi.org/10.2499/p15738coll2.133451