Aflatoxin and Food Safety: Recent African Perspectives

Abstract

The issue of food safety in Africa is one which interacts with and is frequently subjugate to issues of food security, especially in geographic areas where food shortages are caused by recurrent natural weather phenomena such as drought. In addition, many subsistence farming communities in Africa are reliant on the consumption of home‐grown crops, irrespective of the quality considerations normally applied in the developed world. Nevertheless, some African governments have instituted food safety regulations to control mycotoxin, especially aflatoxin, contamination of the national food supply and research into natural occurrence of aflatoxins in a range of local foods is widely conducted. This review summarises the work published in this field through the previous decade. It emphasizes that much of the research effort has been performed in South Africa, Egypt and in various countries in west Africa including Ghana, Nigeria and The Gambia. Although much of the published research deals with levels of aflatoxin contamination in staple foods such as maize and groundnuts, other particularly local foods such as cured and smoke‐dried fish have been implicated as sources of dietary aflatoxin in various areas of Africa. The conclusion to be drawn from this survey is that aflatoxin exposure remains an important aspect of food safety which needs to be addressed by African communities.