Hotline Documentary: Poison on the Menu 1

Food… Everyone needs it. And no one survives without it. But what is the quality of food that you take in and how can you be sure that what you eat is keeping you healthy and not killing you softly? In this edition of Hotline Documentaries christened ‘Poison on the Menu’, we explore how the food you consume could be killing you slowly with or without your knowledge and approval.

According to the World Health Organisation, one in every ten people falls ill from consuming contaminated food every year. There are many causes of this contamination, including food being liaised with harmful microorganisms, unwholesome additives and chemical residue, thereby resulting in food borne diseases.

“Food borne diseases are illnesses that we acquire from eating food that is contaminated. So the contamination could be as a result of micro-organisms or germs or it could also be as a result of toxins or poisons. So the symptoms include abdominal pain, vomiting or diarrhea,” Dr. Donne Ameme of the University of Ghana’s School of Public Health explained.

The contamination could happen during production on the farm, transportation, food preparation, among others. The most common sources of food borne diseases are fresh foods which are usually not cooked before consumption.

Victims tell their stories
Ama Kodum, a communications expert in Accra once had a terrible experience after consuming such contaminated food. “I was going to my village for a funeral. I bought banana along the way. By evening time, I started experiencing severe stomach pains and I was running. My brother in law had to take me to the hospital. For three to four days, I was completely down,” she narrated.

“Just imagine that the other day too I bought sweet pepper and put it in the fridge and a couple of days later, it had gotten spoilt. Let me use the language the women use, it melted. Its chemicals that people are putting on it because people want to make money at all cost so the vegetables must look beautiful and attractive and it’s killing people,” Ama Kodum added.

Ama was lucky to have survived because sometimes, it gets more serious than this. As Dr. Donne Ameme explains, food borne diseases could even cause organ failure and death. “Sometimes you may get complications that relate to the kidney, your kidney may fail. You may get joint complications. Sometimes, brain and nervous tissue damage could result from foodborne diseases and ultimately you may die but most of the food borne diseases resolve without complications,” he said.

Kofi Darko, a resident of Kumasi is another victim of food poisoning who has been sharing his story. He remembers buying fruits on the streets of Kumasi after a hard day’s work to satisfy his hunger because he had previously been advised to stay away from heavy food at night. Kofi says he almost lost his life that night, and had to spend two nights in the hospital.

“I had butterflies in my tummy. It was a weird experience. We had to rush to the hospital. After the doctor conducted tests, he said I had taken poison. They gave me activated charcoal so I can vomit everything out. They took samples to run some tests and they realized the fruits had some chemical substances….. They forced it to ripe by adding carbide that I hear they use to cause the banana to ripe immaturely. The doctor said if I hadn’t been rushed to the hospital, I could have died.” he narrated.

Deliberate/inadvertent contamination of foods

Sometimes, handlers of food deliberately and criminally contaminate them with poisonous chemicals to induce or delay ripening. Other times, the intention is to preserve the foods and make them more attractive to consumers. Remember the survey by Food and Drugs Authority last year which showed more than 90 percent of palm oil on the market contained deadly Sudan IV dye? Remember the story that formalin was allegedly being used to preserve ‘koobi’ fish? And many more. Well, the Food and Drugs Authority says they have a lot of challenges monitoring the quality of foods which are not packaged before sale.

“When we talk of the non-prepackage foods like palm oil, vegetables and others, regulating them is not easy. But we occasionally do market surveys to pick samples and check their quality,” Maria Lovelace Johnson who is Head of Food Regulation at the authority explained.

There are however other forms of contamination that happen inadvertently. Nanabro Hagar Afia of the Horticultural Department at KNUST conducted a study on the quality of some selected vegetables being consumed in the Kumasi Metropolis including carrot, cabbage and green pepper. Vegetables sampled from four of five different suburbs surveyed contained faecal materials, which Hagar notes could pose a threat to the health of consumers.

“They are from faeces dropping… Some use poultry droppings and the irrigation waters used could also be the source. Because the water runs through the refuse damps and gutters, there could be some human faecal residues in the water which also causes these coliforms,” Nanabro said.

The contamination was attributed to the deposit of human waste and garbage around the production sites which pollutes water used by the farmers to irrigate the vegetables. A situation that is all too common at various vegetable growing areas including Kwadaso, Tanoso and Gyinyaase. Joy news traveled to Gyinyase to go observe the cultural practices farmers apply to their work there.

“I am here at a large lettuce farm, the size of two football parks at Gyinyaase, near Atonsu in Kumasi. I see two young men carrying spraying cans running around helter skelter to fetch water from a nearby source to come irrigate the vegetable fields. I approach to check the water source. It’s a drain, what is popularly called gutter. It’s a stagnant water source. It’s green and dark in colour. I can see faecal matter and I see heaps of rubbish by the side,” Joy news Joseph Opoku Gakpo reported.

Daniel Adjei who is with the local Vegetable Growers Association says they are working to stop this practice of using contaminated water to grow vegetables. “As for us we, are an association. We meet regularly and teach our members to use clean water for water their fields,” he explained.

I visit another such farm at Begoro in the Eastern Region. The farm sits beside stagnant, brownish looking and muddy water which is used for irrigating the fields. As these farmers admit, the water source is unhygienic and has been the source of fungus infestation that ends up destroying their fields.

“The water we use to irrigate our crops is dirty water. It’s not clean water. It attracts pests to the fields. Sometimes, cattle walk in it and infest it with fungus. And when we use it on our fields, they infest the farm. The moment you use it to water your crops, the fungus then attack the roots of the plants,” Danso Samuel a farmer in the area explained.

Agric Consultant with the Meridian Agricultural Services Aaron Attefa Ampofo says there is a reason for which the use of such polluted water is common in vegetable production. They add to the nutritional value of the soil and it thus gives farmers better yield.

“It’s not only nutrients that are coming into these drains. There are other industrial waste that come into these drains, sometimes faecal matter. And they come with pathogens,” he explained.

Post-harvest handling
Improper handling of food once they get off the farm has also been identified as major causes of food-borne diseases. Traders storing foods on the floor and in unhygienic environments in the market; tomatoes for example being kept until they rot before consumption, among others all contribute to such food contamination.

“It was also seen that the vegetables from the markets have higher levels of microbes than those on the farms. They were more contaminated…. That could be from the way vegetables are handled by the market women. Some don’t even wash the containers they use to keep them. Some keep them on the floor,” Hagar Nanabro noted her survey found.

The danger is that such vegetables and fruits do not go through heat before consumption, exposing consumers to the effects of food-borne diseases.

“Typical example is lettuces and our cabbages. We just put them in water, slice them and they go onto the waakye or foods we are consuming. And that is how dangerous some of these things can be,” Agric Consultant Aaron Attefa Ampofo explained.

Aaron Attefa believes it’s about time consumers took ultimate responsibility for the food they consumed and insisted that only clean, unadulterated stuff enters their stomachs. He is asking consumers to double check the quality of the foods they buy before consumption.

“The consumer has the power to change the situation. We have regulators there but the buck stops with the consumer because they have the purchasing power. They pay the cash. So consumers have to be observant. We have to give feedback to our producers,” he advised.

The story continues in part 2 of POISON ON THE MENU.

Below is the link to the first part.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VQHFpyc0t0&t=97s

By Joseph Opoku Gakpo
Hotline: Poison on the Menu 2
By Joseph Opoku Gakpo
In the second part of the Hotline Documentary ‘Poison on the Menu’ which explores how the food you consume could be killing you slowly, we focus on pesticide poisoning.

It’s one major but commonly underrated cause of food borne diseases. As these farmers in the Fanteakwa District of the Eastern Region explain, there is no way their crops will survive without the application of chemicals because of constant attacks by pests. “The pests hardly respond to the chemicals. So we need to keep applying the chemicals,” Obed Asiamah, a vegetable farmer in the area explained.

Let’s look at lettuce for example. It takes 12 weeks to mature between planting and harvesting. But it’s sprayed at least six times before harvest. These chemicals are strong, and need to be applied under strict health and safety procedures. With the most important of these standards being the duration between last chemical application and harvest, as Agric Extension officer in the Fanteakwa District Christian Zormelo explains.

“As for pesticides, especially insecticides, every two weeks you have to spray. But when it is almost 9 weeks, you stop the chemical usage. So that you have at least 12 to 21 days before you harvest to allow for all the residual effects to break down,” he explained

Farmers applying fertilisers wrongly
But the extension officer admits a lot of farmers in the vicinity flout these standards and end up risking the lives of their consumers. “Even some prefer spraying and then the following day, they harvest,” Zormelo disclosed. Wisdom Korkor is one of such farmers. He told Joy news: “At times, the traders who come to buy the cabbage put pressure on farmers to harvest just a day after spraying the chemicals. They get upset if we do not allow that because they have the money.”

The evidence of how powerful these chemicals are lies in the way farmers react to them when they apply the pesticides on farms without the necessary protective clothing. Ernest Boabeng, popularly called Wofa Atta is a garden eggs, pepper and tomato farmer at Beregoro has been sharing his experience. “When you are spraying, you will see that you will become ill. You suffer headache, and you suffer pains and you get eye problem,” he said. “It makes me unable to sleep at night. I get fever. I can’t even breathe. My body itches. Then I get headache. I am unable to go to work for three days,” another farmers said.

And in fact, in the home of Asutsuare based rice farmer John Awuku Dziwornu, someone died as a result of the wrongful storage of chemicals. “I lost a cousin’s daughter to insecticides. The father went to the farm, came back and didn’t store the remaining pesticides. So this little girl took it and drank it and died. That girl could have been a doctor or lawyer or president and I am saddened by that,” he explained.

But one way or the other, these chemicals find their way into the diets of many as a result of the wrongful application and handling of such chemicals. As a study by Hagar Afia Nanabro of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology’s Horticultural Department reveals, a lot of these chemicals are in the diet you consume each day, sometimes above the permissible limits. Quoting a study she conducted on the quality of some selected vegetables in Kumasi, Hagar notes: “It was seen that most of the vegetables contain various pesticides and residues in different ranges.”

Agric Consultant Aaron Attefa Ampofo says such contaminated foods get onto the market on daily basis. “Some farmers use the chemical dithane to help the tomatoes attain very red colour. Most of us will go to the market, you take the tomato and see this yellowish powder on it. How many of us take time to wash the tomato before consuming it?” he quizzed.

More cases of pesticide mishandling
Fredrick Boampong, Programmes Manager of Crop Life Ghana, an association of chemical sellers says they have also observed the mishandling of pesticides and their containers in several farming communities across the country. “During our programme, we found that most of the farmers were using the chemical containers for keeping salt in their kitchen. Some were also using it for water. It is dangerous. With the chemical container, even if you triple rinse it, it’s still hazardous,” Mr. Boampong explained. Farmers misuse pesticides in at least six different ways in Ghana including spraying too close to harvest, over dosage, and applying pesticides intended for cash crops like cocoa and cotton to growing food crops, some of which contain unsafe active ingredients.

Unregulated marketing of chemicals
A visit to Kejetia in the Kumasi Metropolis, a hub where a lot of these chemicals are sold revealed that despite their strong nature, they are not sold under any regulated conditions. Some are sold in the open and on table tops. Some of them have inscriptions in foreign language. Sadly, a lot of the sellers are uneducated, raising concerns about how they are able to properly advise their customers on how to use these chemicals safely.

Deaths from Pesticide misuse
In fact, a recent report by the Northern Presbyterian Agricultural Services documents how in 2010 alone, 15 persons in the Upper East Region died from suspected pesticide poisoning according to the Regional Directorate of Health. Most of these deaths occurred due to poor storage of pesticides, which seeped into food stocks. 118 others suffered poisoning from consuming food contaminated with pesticides in the Garu, Bawku West and Talensi Nabdam Districts.

Agric Consultant Aaron Attefa attributes the situation to the fact that a lot of these farmers are illiterates and don’t understand safety instructions. “We have a huge problem because between 30 to 70 percent of the farmers producing vegetables are illiterates. The production context is changing. The factors that come into play are becoming complex. With the improvement of science, agro chemicals are not the simple chemicals we used to know. So you need some minimal education or sensitization to decipher between which chemicals to use at what time,” he explained.

There are also lots of obsolete and expired chemicals on the market, some of which are being used on food thereby endangering consumers and farming communities. “Most of our members are complaining about their chemicals being faked. People are printing labels of our member companies on other concoctions and selling to farmers. And it is happening in broad day light. Everybody is seeing it,” Fred Boampong of Crop Life Ghana noted with concern. “The regulators are seeing it. We should have pesticide inspectors across the country but unfortunately either they are not enough or they are not there at all because we are not seeing the effect of their inspection… It’s a whole mess up there,” he added.

A study by the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission in June 2010 at five markets in Accra found that 23.8% of the fruits on the market contained residues of insecticides like DDT above the accepted Maximum Residue Limit. The report warned the continuous consumption of such fruits could result in deadly chronic effects.

Ban on chemicals
In order to deal with the problem of food contamination by pesticides, there is a push for a ban on the application of chemicals to food production. Dr. Samuel Atta Mills who is a farmer and MP for Komenda Edina Eguafo Abrim (KEEA) is leading the charge. “We need to ban these things. Ban the importation of pesticides. We need to get to organic farming. And anybody who is going to handle this should be qualified persons. And we shouldn’t be dependent so much on these things. Most of these advanced countries have banned all these weedicides. But they need to make money and so they send them to us,” he alleged. But chemical dealers disagree. “Believe you me, we are at this stage and we can’t do without chemicals,” Fred Boampong of Crop Life Ghana noted.

Agric Extension agent Christina Zormeloo is encouraging farmers not to jump into the use of chemicals without consulting agric extension agents even when their fields are attacked by pests. “We are advising that, whatever they see on the field, they should inform the Department of Agric and take samples to them so that they can actually do diagnoses and do prescriptions for them. They should not to just go to the store and buy whatever chemicals they want. It’s like going to the hospital to see a doctor and get drugs,” he said. There are also concerns about hard chemicals like mercury and lead contaminating foods as a result of activities of illegal miners across the country. These illegal miners usually wash such chemicals into water bodies to retrieve gold. These chemicals end up as sources of irrigation for crops.

Discrimination
One interesting point is that, some of the foods we consume in Ghana are not accepted at the international level. For example, Ghana has for the last two years not been able to export chilli pepper and other vegetables to the European Union after pests were detected in some of the exports. These banned foods are still consumed in the country. For players in the food industry, this is completely out of place.

“It does appear that the people out there would want to eat quality foods and we are also concerned. We make every effort to provide them with quality food. But I ask myself what of the food that we consume locally. Can this contamination cause illness? Can it kill people? The answer is yes,” Food Consultant Aaron Ateffa noted with concern. The point of interest is that; if the foods are not good for export to the international market, why is no one stopping Ghanaians from eating them?

Regulatory institutions must sit up
The Food and Drugs Authority however says it is doing a lot to deal with such cases of food contamination. “The FDA is working assiduously to ensure food on the market are safe,” Maria Lovelace who Johnson is Head of Food Regulation at the authority explained.

Fred Boampong of Crop Life Ghana says the Ministry of Food and Agriculture and its Plant Protection Regulatory Services Division, as well as Environmental Protection Agency should do more to sanctify the agro chemicals industry.

“EPA and PPRSD, they are doing their best but their best is not good enough. We have a lot of challenges in the system with the influx of agro-chemicals. We have a lot of agro chemicals in the system that are not registered for use in the country. But they are on the market,” he said.

Agric Consultant Aaron Attefah attributes this to government’s inability to resource such institutions adequately. “The very laws that create these institutions stipulate that they should be funded. But you will go there and money to conduct surveys on the market and also to enforce the regulations is not there,” he noted with concern.

Way forward
President of the Concerned Farmers Association of Ghana Nana Oboadie Boateng Bonsu is advocating for a food tracing system to check the problem. “Go to Agbogbloshie and see. Everything is from wherever, they send it to Agbogblosihe and people just buy them without any tag. And so when there is any food poisoning, we will not know the source. This must change so that if it is today that you harvested your products, we know what you sent it to the market,” he explained. He says this will ensure traders in food are held responsible when there are cases of contamination, so they stop bad practices.

Below is link to the video of the documentary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvXaVwmza1A&t=18s