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In its ninth year, the Harvest Money Expo continues to deliver valuable information, products, and connections to Ugandans.
The biggest agricultural show in the country is a Vision Group initiative that has been taking place at Namboole Stadium from February 14th to 16th. Alongside exhibitors’ stalls with a variety of agricultural products and supplementary products such as machinery are the training workshops, which offer invaluable tips to farmers and prospective farmers.
In one such session by Mandela Millers, a part of the Mandela Group of Companies, the audience was awakened to the fact that aflatoxin can easily be ingested by the public. Samuel Musyoka, the quality assurance manager at Mandela Millers, said, “Aflatoxin is a serious safety concern. They are poisonous chemicals produced by fungi. They are found in maize and peanuts because they have fats, and that is where fungi thrive.”
(Credit: Maria Wamala)
Explaining how the fungi make aflatoxin, Musyoka said, “When fungi go in the maize, they excrete aflatoxin, which is invisible and can’t be killed by cooking. You can kill it at 150°C and higher. Even though we cook the grains with aflatoxin, we still consume them directly.
(Credit: Maria Wamala)
Musyoka said since Mandela Group cares about quality; they check all the maize they buy from dealers, and if they have more than seven parts per billion of aflatoxin, they reject it. He said the acceptable global standard for aflatoxin level is 10 parts per billion, but Mandela Millers set the bar a little higher at seven parts per billion level of aflatoxin. “This is because we care for our customers’ safety,” said Musyoka.
Danger of aflatoxin
“When people eat food with aflatoxin, they are at a risk of getting cancer of the liver, throat, and colon over time,” he said, adding, “We accept 69% and reject 31% of the trucks that bring maize to our mill. But what happens to the 31%? It goes back to the market because some millers don’t care about checking for aflatoxin.” Sadly, Musyoka noted that most of the rejected maize ends up in schools.
“But we advise farmers and dealers to destroy it. Some flour even contains metal contamination, which can be detected by placing a magnet near it.
How to prevent aflatoxin
Musyoka advised the audience to do the following:
- Make sure to dry the maize between zero and 24 hours after harvesting.
- Don’t dry your maize on the ground because the fungi may be in the soil.
- Dry it on a surface, i.e., on tarpaulin, and dry it to the 13.5 level of moisture. At that level, the seed should be dry when you break it.
On its last day today, this year’s expo is being sponsored by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Uganda, Engineering Solutions Ltd. (Engsol), K-ROMA (Bella Wine), Tunga Nutrition, Uganda Development Corporation (UDC), Pepsi Cola, and aBi Development.
