Liam Taylor, a reporter for The Economist, recently interviewed Uganda-based food safety experts at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and at Uganda’s premiere university, Makerere, in development of an article about whether wet markets will be banned in the wake of COVID-19.

This year’s report focuses on the challenges of feeding Africa’s cities and the opportunities available to smallholder farmers and agribusinesses to meet the needs of the continent’s fast growing urban food markets.

The report features a chapter on food safety and public health in urban food markets in Africa. Currently, Africa suffers from the highest per capita rate of foodborne illnesses in the world. The riskiest foods from a health perspective are animal-source foods, fruits and fresh vegetables. Consumption of these food products is rising rapidly in African cities.

Improving food safety in Africa’s urban food markets — both the dominant informal markets and the growing formal markets — will go a long way to safeguard the health of consumers and reduce the economic and health burden of foodborne illnesses.

Interventions include improving domestic market infrastructure, training of food handlers and increasing awareness of the shared responsibility of regulators and value chain actors to provide safe food.

Unsafe food directly undermines human health and jeopardises the attainment of national, continental and global development goals. For this reason, African governments urgently need to prioritize food safety and adopt policies and strategies that will ensure the delivery of adequate and safe food to urban markets.

Citation
Kang’ethe, E., Grace, D., Alonso, S., Lindahl, J., Mutua, F. and Haggblade, S. 2020. Food safety and public health implications of growing urban food markets. IN: AGRA, Africa Agriculture Status Report. Feeding Africa’s cities: Opportunities, challenges, and policies for linking African farmers with growing urban food markets. Issue 8. Nairobi, Kenya: Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). pp. 101–119.

Originally posted on the AgHealth blog

So what is the right response to these informal markets? Read the full article here…

https://www.ilri.org/news/wildlife-markets-pandemic-prohibit-or-preserve-them-ban-or-promote-them

Listeria in processed meat products from South Africa, E. Coli in romaine lettuce in the US, Salmonella in eggs across Europe and Campylobacter in chicken liver pâté in Australia. These are among the many pathogens and foods at the centre of recent food safety crises worldwide, estimated to impact as many people as infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria and TB.

But while deaths and illnesses from unsafe food hit countries worldwide, the incidences of these illnesses and lost lives are disproportionately high in Africa.

Across the continent, tainted food kills about 140 000 people every year, and leaves 91 million more suffering from diarrhoea, tapeworm, hepatitis and even dysentery and typhoid.

This is on course to become even worse as income growth and urbanisation in Africa are enabling better, more diverse diets. Ironically, these healthier foods – such as dairy, eggs, meat, fruits and vegetables – are more likely to be contaminated.

Because the food system across most of Africa is largely informal and unregulated, pinpointing the source of food illness, critical to its eradication, is challenging. It could be meat contaminated in an abattoir, listeria-tainted food doled out from a food cart or mold-infected grain baked into bread.

Contaminated food will continue to be a public menace until countries implement systems ensuring the safety and quality of food throughout the food chain — from the farm to the table.

Limited knowledge

Ethiopia is among the first African countries to prioritise food safety. Deaths and illnesses from a range of food borne pathogens are commonplace. Adulteration is also rampant. Producers of the beloved national dish, injera, have even been caught mixing sawdust with teff flour for economic gain.

The Ministry of Health is developing a functional food safety system that incentivises companies to deliver safer food and regulates those who don’t deliver standard food products.

But Ethiopia, and countries like it, won’t conquer the complex food safety challenges that come with informal food systems until everyday consumers are empowered to become the first line of defence against unsafe food.

In many countries across the globe, well-informed consumers — often with the help of lawyers and NGOs – have successfully used their purchasing power to compel bad-acting companies to fall in line with food safety standards.

African consumers could likewise become catalysts for better food. But before this power can be unlocked citizens need a crash course in food safety. Right now, this knowledge is limited. This is certainly the case in Ethiopia where we are involved in ongoing research

The country’s consumption of raw foods illustrates the case. Raw beef is deeply embedded in Ethiopian food culture. People are aware it could make them sick, yet they don’t know how to ensure it’s safe — and they don’t want to give it up. Raw milk is also beloved. But a study found that most households were unaware of milk-borne diseases.

Lessons from elsewhere

In the UK and elsewhere in Europe, consumer faith in beef collapsed after an outbreak of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy. The result was that the European Union’s food safety system was completely overhauled to win back trust.

And in South Africa, the company responsible for the Listeria-tainted bologna that killed 200 people faces class action lawsuits from the families of the victims.

In Ethiopia, new research – jointly funded by the UK Government’s Department for International Development and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – underway is trying to determine how consumers’ relationship with food can be transformed to improve food safety in informal markets for vegetables and poultry. We’re focused in areas where monitoring and regulation is difficult to achieve.

While previous efforts to weed out bad food have focused on training producers or regulators, this project also seeks to harness the voice of consumers.

Related studies in the country are devising how to manage the health risks of raw foods. Other factors being looked into are foodborne disease epidemiology, surveillance and control. A central aim is to build the know-how Ethiopian government officials, academics and consumers need to take on foodborne illnesses.

These initiatives demonstrate that policymakers, donors and researchers are increasingly asking themselves how they can tackle food safety challenges to ensure food is not just plentiful and nutritious, but also safe.

Turning point

A 2015 report offering the first-ever estimates of the incidence, mortality and disease burden due to 31 foodborne hazards worldwide marked a turning point in this thinking.

Fuelling this momentum, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, the World Bank and the African Union co-hosted two of the largest international gatherings on food safety this year, which took place in Switzerland and Ethiopia.

Clearly, international and national actors are moving in the right direction, but more must be done to maximise the role of consumers — where they buy and eat the food, whether it’s in markets, food stalls or at dining tables.

A bottom up approach that educates and empowers consumers is the only way to ensure that the drive toward healthier, more sustainable diets delivered through agriculture doesn’t neglect the role of food safety in securing the health of millions.

Arie Havelaar, Professor, University of Florida and Ashagrie Zewdu Woldegiorgis, Assistant Professor, Addis Ababa University

The World Health Organization estimates that each year, 600 million people suffer from an episode of foodborne disease, or one out of every 10 global citizens. To highlight the need for safe, accessible food worldwide, the United Nations General Council last year proclaimed June 7 as World Food Safety Day, with this Friday marking its first observance.

Food safety encompasses everything from production to preparation to consumption, according to experts at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences who are involved in examining that process and its overall effects on human health.

“For a long time, food safety had not been considered a major public health issue,” said Arie Havelaar, a professor in the UF/IFAS department of animal sciences. “World Food Safety Day is a big step in building momentum, not only among governments, but also to remind the public every year that obtaining safe food continues to be a challenge for many in the world.”

Havelaar, who is also affiliated with the UF/IFAS Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Livestock Systems, the Emerging Pathogens Institute and the Institute for Sustainable Food Systems, primarily focuses his research on the transmission of infectious diseases between livestock and humans. In a just-published report, Havelaar and a global team of researchers examined the relationship between animal-sourced foods and human health. The study highlights the importance of nutrients provided by such foods in promoting fetal and child development, while also noting their potential to expose foodborne pathogens, particularly in countries where food control systems are lacking.

The report, published in the journal PLOS One on the eve of World Food Safety Day, aims to inform food safety management practices.

A typical plate served with fried pork and raw vegetables in East Africa (photo credit: ILRI/Martin Heilmann, Freie Universität Berlin).

Havelaar said that in countries like the United States, with food production regulations and good healthcare systems, such efforts have shown success in reducing incidences of foodborne illness and preventing fatalities when foodborne illnesses do arise. For many in low- and middle-income countries, however, the burden is much higher and deaths due to foodborne diseases are common. Children under five years of age bear the greatest risk.

“Our studies have shown that priorities differ between countries – even within the same region – so providing the best evidence about the burden of foodborne disease is key to prioritizing control methods,” Havelaar said. “What is important is that every actor in the food chain – government, industries, consumers – recognizes the role they play and sets up mechanisms to effectively work together. Some of it is educating the consumer, but it’s very difficult to change consumer habits. So, we also look at the processing of foods going all the way back to the farm.”

According to Keith Schneider, a professor in the UF/IFAS department of food science and human nutrition whose research primarily focuses on fruits and vegetables, the food supply chain also includes the water sources available to producers.

“A lot of the issues we may attribute to food may come down to not having clean water, and when produce may be irrigated by contaminated water,” Schneider said.

In the home, cleanliness is also key to food safety, he added, emphasizing safe storage and preparation practices through sanitization of all surfaces, including “hands, countertops, cutting boards, utensils, refrigerator and pantry.”

But many aspects of food safety are outside consumer control, said Michelle Danyluk, associate professor of food science at the UF/IFAS Citrus Research and Education Center in Lake Alfred, Florida.

“In certain places, if your choice is between safe food and available food, you’re going to eat what’s available,” said Danyluk, who in April was elected to a five-year term on the International Association of Food Protection’s executive board, which concludes with a year as its president. The organization convenes professionals in government, industry and academia to advance food safety needs worldwide.

“Food safety is such an important international issue, having that discussion at a global level is very important,” Danyluk said. “So the fact that the U.N., WHO and the Food and Agriculture Organization recognized World Food Safety Day is a tremendous step in recognizing a very significant problem.”

Both, Michelle Danyluk and Arie Havelaar, are research partners in the ILRI-led project “Urban food markets in Africa: Incentivizing food safety using a pull-push approach” supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, UK aid from the UK Department for International Development, and the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health led by the International Food Policy Research Institute.

Furthermore training, empowerment and consumer campaigns are developed. The QMRA will be instrumental in creating a baseline risk assessment model, helping in selecting most promising and cost-effective interventions to reduce the public health burden. Based on the obtained data within the overall program the QMRA model will be validated and further updated, it will be expanded with a cost-benefit model, and a generic extrapolation will be performed to extend the scope both for the relevant pathogens as well as geographically.

The application deadline is 27 May, 2019. For more information and submission, visit https://www.wur.nl/en/Jobs/Vacancies/Show/Researcher-FHM-.htm

For details visit: https://www.ilri.org/jobs?jid=28580-scientist-epidemiology

Deadline: 7 December 2018