Editorial- Ensuring food safety and security

Ensuring food safety and security

Recently, issue of food poisoning in the country took another dimension from the usual accounts of bacterial, viral and fungal infestation of consumable agricultural produce like cassava, yam flour, beans, maize and peppers etc through rodents and other animals.

This time around it was ‘next level’ as beans meant for human consumption were reportedly sprayed with Sniper, a well known rat poison, in the bid to preserve the food item. This caused an uproar which had gone viral on the social media.

Although no reliable statistics was available to show the number of people who had died as a result of food-poisoning related to eating agricultural produce sprayed with pesticides and other dangerous chemical substances, the media had, of recent, been awash with the sad news of deaths from food poisoning, necessitating an awakening of consciousness of all and sundry most especially, farmers and produce buyers, to proper preservation for safe edible foods delivery ,even as government need to galvanize monitoring measures to prevent such occurrence.

It is obvious that mere rule-of-thumb mechanism cannot preserve the quantum of commercial agricultural produce transacted for daily in the open markets, which makes imperative to use pesticides to preserve and prevent these items from being eaten up or even infected.

This brings about the question of agricultural produce sanitary inspection officials whose duties are to monitor and educate all food vendors and others on the safe application and kind of pesticides to be applied. The need to ensure and enforce regular fumigation of agricultural warehouses with human friendly chemicals must be adhered to for food preservation to avoid wastages in view of increasing population, and also to avert untimely death occasioned by food poison.

Sniper, if professionally handled, is able to control a wide range of pests in stored agricultural produce and warehouses.  What must have happened could have been as result of direct application on the beans which of course is bound to be injurious because it is poisonous for human beings as well.

In view of high food import bills, it will not be out of place as part of food security plans for government to efficiently monitor food vendors, ware houses, to ensure proper handling and application in their bid to preserve their wares for sale in order to prevent food poisoning.

All the agencies affiliated with ensuring food safety must be awake to their responsibilities by working in synergy to ensure an efficient food standard for all and sundry.