{"id":625,"date":"2021-03-03T13:50:10","date_gmt":"2021-03-03T18:50:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/?p=625"},"modified":"2025-02-04T16:24:58","modified_gmt":"2025-02-04T21:24:58","slug":"how-safe-are-groundnuts-produced-in-senegal-main-takeaways-from-a-pilot-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/how-safe-are-groundnuts-produced-in-senegal-main-takeaways-from-a-pilot-project\/","title":{"rendered":"How Safe are Groundnuts Produced in Senegal? Main Takeaways from a Pilot Project"},"content":{"rendered":"

Groundnuts (peanuts) are widely used in Senegalese cuisine and are critical for poverty reduction strategies targeted to rural households. In fact,\u00a0groundnuts are grown by 52% of Senegalese households in extreme poverty<\/a>. However, every\u00a0stage\u00a0of their production, processing\u00a0and storage carry a risk of microbial and fungal contamination that can lead to foodborne illnesses. Understanding contamination levels, household awareness of food safety hazards\u00a0and farmers\u2019 attitudes towards interventions to reduce the risk of foodborne diseases is critical to strengthening food safety in Senegal. In a project funded by the\u00a0Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety<\/a>\u00a0(FSIL), an interdisciplinary team at Purdue University partnered with the\u00a0Institut S\u00e9n\u00e9galais de Recherches Agricoles<\/a>\u00a0(ISRA) to quantify chemical and microbial contamination levels in groundnuts that smallholder farmers in Senegal eat, sell\u00a0and store for seed. Surveys of 250 smallholder farmers in the country’s peanut basin, as well as\u00a0testing for chemical and microbial pathogens in their stored groundnuts, provided four interesting results.<\/p>\n

1. Awareness of foodborne diseases<\/strong><\/h3>\n

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 <\/em>and Salmonella<\/em> 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\u00a0or 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\u00a0and storage practices that reduce the risk of contamination in their crops.<\/p>\n

2. Chemical contaminants: Aflatoxins<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In 87% of groundnut samples, levels of aflatoxins were below the safety threshold set by the European Union \u2014 4 parts per billion (ppb) \u2014\u00a0however, 8% contained very high levels, above 100 ppb. This suggests that a non-trivial share of farmers had samples exhibiting aflatoxin\u00a0levels above the EU standard, and that some groundnuts were extremely unsafe for human consumption. To date,\u00a0it has been shown<\/a>\u00a0that 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\u00a0and improved storage.<\/p>\n

3. Microbial contaminants: Coliforms and Enterobacteriaceae<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The groundnuts sampled contained high levels of coliforms and Enterobacteriaceae: \u00a097% 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 (p\u00e2te d\u2019arachide) 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.<\/p>\n

4. Adoption of new technologies: The case of Aflasafe<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The biocontrol product Aflasafe can\u00a0significantly reduce aflatoxins in groundnuts during plant growth<\/a>. 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\u2019 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\u00a0and if willingness to pay evolves with adoption of the technology within farmers\u2019 social networks.<\/p>\n

Next steps<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Food systems in sub-Saharan Africa, including in Senegal, face several simultaneous challenges. These\u00a0systems\u00a0need 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 \u2014 widespread food surveillance \u2014 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\u00a0and, in turn, boost rural households\u2019 income and welfare; and (ii) protect local consumers and reduce the health and economic burden of foodborne diseases.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0and rural incomes in Senegal.<\/p>\n

Amanda Garris (FSIL) and Yurani Arias-Granada (Purdue University) contributed to this story.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Groundnuts (peanuts) are widely used in Senegalese cuisine and are critical for poverty reduction strategies targeted to rural households. In fact,\u00a0groundnuts are grown by 52% of Senegalese households in extreme poverty. However, every\u00a0stage\u00a0of their production, processing\u00a0and storage carry a risk of microbial and fungal contamination that can lead to foodborne illnesses. Understanding contamination levels, household […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":626,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-program-updates"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2354,"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions\/2354"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ag.purdue.edu\/food-safety-innovation-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}