Tagline: Sustainable and scalable solutions to food safety in informal markets
Champion: Delia Grace
Team: FSZ, A4NH, Silvia, Johanna, Hung, Fred, Kristina, Barbara, Nadhem
Sustainability and scalability- the Holy Grail of CG research and the darling of donors - and one that has often eluded livestock interventions; but what if we had already found the secret, only we hadn’t noticed?
In this idea note we argue that ILRI’s approach to food safety in informal markets has already generated convincing evidence of sustainability, scale and substantial impacts and the time is ripe to take this promising approach to animal and vegetable value chains in Africa and Asia.
The latest estimates from the World Health Organisation estimate that foodborne disease is responsible for nearly one third of diarrhea in developing countries. As diarrhea is the second most important disease in terms of health burden this makes foodborne disease a major public health priority.
Most foodborne disease is caused by microbial pathogens and comes from fresh foods sold in informal markets. And food safety is not only a priority health issue, it is also a standards issue which is already excluding smallholders from export markets and supermarkets and threatens to exclude them from wet markets also.
In the early 2000’s ILRI started working in the smallholder dairy chain in Kenya. Food safety was not seen as a desired objective but rather a constraint to smallholder development! Fortunately, the solution arrived at – training and certifying of vendors and providing a enabling policy environment – was shown to improve the safety of milk as well as to save the Kenyan economy millions of dollars a year.
The model was extended and adapted to butchers in Nigeria, and milk traders in Assam, India and Tanzania, and is being actively research in other livestock and fish value chains.
Nine years after the Smallholder Dairy project ended in Kenya and three years after the Traditional Milk project ended in Guwahti, Assam, we are re-evaluating the results. We find that many traders are in the schemes (70% in Guwahti and at least 25-70% in Kenya). The project beneffited the Kenyan economy by around USD 33 million annually and the economy of Guwahati, by USD 6 million annually. Traders have been shown to have better practices and safer milk and an estimated 6.5 million consumers are benefitting from safer milk. In Nigeria, most butchers in the largest market in Ibadan participated in the scheme, leading to 20% more meat samples meeting standards. Training and $9 per butcher but resulted in savings $780/per butcher per year from reduced cost of human illness.
Safe food, fair food works and offers the opportunity to improve the health of consumers and the wealth of the smallholders and value chain actors who feed Africa and Asia. Now is the time to make the case for extending the approach more widely.
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