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Malawi: Purging Peanuts of Deadly Aflatoxin
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SciDev.Net (London)
7 November 2007
Posted to the web 8 November 2007
Charles Mkoka
Local efforts to put an end to aflatoxin outbreaks are helping groundnut farmers back to prosperity, reports Charles Mkoka.
For Amos Katosa, a subsistence farmer in Malawi's central region district of Mchinji, the groundnut -- popularly known as the peanut-- has been his main source of income for the past 40 years.
He describes how the crop helped to pay school fees for his four children and to buy household necessities for his family.
But over the past few decades, peanut sales have been declining at commodity markets.
Little did farmers like Katosa know, but the groundnut, once their best income earner, was facing a major challenge that would jeopardise Malawi's contribution to the international export market.
The challenge was aflatoxin, a highly potent poison contaminating crops and rocking Malawi's groundnut industry, which could no longer meet international standards of quality.
Cost of the problem
Aflatoxins are a waste product from the fungus Aspergillus, which grows on food crops such as maize, groundnuts, sorghum and cassava.
The fungus grows on harvested crops under warm, moist conditions that can occur during transit and storage. Unripe crops are also prone to aflatoxin contamination during drought.
Because of the toxicity of aflatoxins, the European Union -- an important trading partner for Malawi -- effectively banned the import of groundnuts from the country in the early 1990s because contamination exceeded acceptable levels.
The European Union limits aflatoxin contamination to four parts per billion, a standard that has cost some developing countries hundreds of millions of dollars in export losses.
The problem, according to Rodomiro Oritz, from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre, is that monitoring for toxins and enforcement of standards are rarely effective in the developing world, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Cost to health
In developing countries such as Malawi, the best-quality foods tend to be exported, whereas poor-quality food -- often contaminated with aflatoxins -- is kept for local consumption.
Children exposed to aflatoxins can suffer from restricted growth and from immune suppression, making them more susceptible to HIV and malaria. Aflatoxins are also strongly associated with the development of liver cancer.
According to Charles Dzamalala, a pathologist at the University of Malawi, acute aflatoxicosis is widespread in developing countries.
The syndrome can be fatal and is characterized by vomiting, abdominal pain, pulmonary oedema, convulsions and coma, and damage to the liver, kidneys and heart.
"Conditions increasing the likelihood of acute aflatoxicosis in humans include limited availability of food, environmental conditions that favour fungal development in crops and commodities, and lack of regulatory systems for aflatoxin monitoring and control," he said.
In 2004 in Kenya, 300 people became ill after consuming aflatoxins, leading to the deaths of 125 people.
Lasting solutions
In Malawi, the challenge presented by aflatoxins has seen the launch of a nongovernmental organisation, Facseat-Tropical.
The organisation promotes food-safety measures, including the prevention of fungal contamination of crops, sorting and removal of contaminated grains, and increasing awareness of state-of-the-art facilities for grain storage.
The organisation plans to assess these measures to determine whether they can be linked to any changes in the pattern of liver-cancer incidence, food poisoning or toxicity in the population.
The National Smallholder Farmers Association of Malawi (NASFAM) is collaborating with the International Crop Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and the United States Agency for International Development to help farmers meet the aflatoxin safety requirements for export markets.
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This involves promoting good agricultural practices, including early planting to prevent groundnuts from maturing during potential drought conditions at the tail end of the season -- which can encourage growth of Aspergillus on ripening crops -- and appropriate harvesting and drying techniques to reduce the possibility of Aspergillus infection.
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