Groundnuts, which are widely consumed in West Africa, are prone to contamination by aflatoxin during production and storage. Although aflatoxin plays a role in many of the important health risks in developing countries, individuals and governments ignore the risks because their health effects are not immediate. In the developed world strong regulations remove contaminated kernels and their products from the food systems. The objective of this paper is to examine production and marketing practices, particularly grading methods, in Ghana’s groundnut value chain to obtain a clear understanding of the sources and levels of aflatoxin contamination in the crop and how such contamination can be sharply reduced.

Aflatoxin is a poisonous substance produced by a fungus, Aspergillus flavus, that occurs naturally in soils of cultivated and non-cultivated areas. The fungus commonly produces the toxin in maize, groundnut, and other staple grains and vegetables, and is especially prevalent in Africa. When animals consume feed contaminated with aflatoxin, milk and (at very low levels) meat, fish and eggs, can also be contam-inated. This note brings together recent research from the CGIAR and others on technologies for aflatoxin control in Africa and provides recommendations for catalyzing their adoption.

Aflatoxins are a naturally occurring carcinogenic byproduct of common fungi on grains and other crops, particularly maize and groundnuts. They pose a significant public health risk in many tropical developing countries and are also a barrier to the growth of domestic and international commercial markets for food and feed. In recent years the aflatoxin problem has garnered greatly increased attention from both policy and donor communities around the globe. What can be done to reduce the detrimental impacts of aflatoxins? Because growth of the molds that produce aflatoxins is caused by multiple factors, and because they must be controlled along the entire value chain from production to consumption, only a robust multifaceted approach to controlling aflatoxins is likely to be effective. The nineteen briefs in this set thus provide different perspectives on aflatoxin risks and solutions. The analyses fall under four broad themes: (1) what is known about the health risks from aflatoxins; (2) how to overcome market constraints to improved aflatoxin control by building new market channels and incentives; (3) what is the international policy context for taking action in developing countries; and (4) what is the state of research on new aflatoxin control technologies, including new methods for aflatoxin detection, crop breeding, biological control, food storage and handling, and postharvest mitigation. These briefs collectively provide a much clearer picture of the state of current efforts at combatting aflatoxins. They also identify what gaps loom particularly large—including the need for contry-specific risk analysis and for testing integrated solutions for the entire supply chain—in our global efforts to effectively reduce human exposure to aflatoxins and increase the economic returns to smallholders in agriculture.

This report reveals that substantial knowledge is available about the aflatoxin challenge that plagues African farmers, other agri-entrepreneurs, and governments. Commissioned by the ACP-EU Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) in collaboration with the African Union Commission - Partnership for Aflatoxin Control in Africa (PACA), this literature review reveals that a wide range of commodities that are traded nationally, regionally and internationally are contaminated by aflatoxins. African citizens and economies are negatively impacted as a result.

What has been the recent performance of the agricultural sector in Mozambique and the progress made thus far toward achieving the objectives established under the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) initiative for Mozambique that began in late-2011?

This report is a component of the Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS)–-funded project “Impacts of Climate Extremes on Future Water and Food Security in South Asia and East Africa.” The goal of the project was to characterize extreme drought events, to improve on a methodology to assess the probability of these events in the future under climate change, to illustrate their impacts, and to provide suggestions on coping strategies. The present report sets the stage for the overall project by undertaking a review of the causes of vulnerability to drought in East Africa and the western Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP) of South Asia, and discussing the options to increase resilience to drought in the agricultural sector. Agriculture is a high-risk endeavor in both regions, due to a combination of recurrent droughts—which may intensify due to climate change—poor soil fertility, and a host of constraints faced by farmers, especially low access to input and output markets. These factors, combined with farmers’ high aversion to risk, stifle investments in agriculture, resulting in continuous underachieving production, low income, and persisting poverty.

While government spending on pro-poor community asset creation and income-transfers could have compounding positive effects on poverty reduction, it is important to first study trends in the allocation of funds, particularly as they relate to the susceptibility of the program to political clientelism. This paper uses expenditure data at the local level in Andhra Pradesh from India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, a rights-based program distributing both public and private goods, to investigate the relationship between voting outcomes and program intensity in the seven years straddling a major election. By focusing on one state where accountability and transparency mechanisms have been employed and implementation efforts have been applauded, the authors do not find evidence of blatant vote buying before the 2009 election but do find that patronage played a small part in fund distribution after the 2009 election. Indeed most variation in expenditures is explained by the observed needs of potential beneficiaries, as the scheme intended.

Despite the rise of targeted input subsidy programs in Africa over the last decade, several questions remain as to whether low and variable soil fertility, frequent drought, and high fertilizer prices render fertilizer unprofitable for large subpopulations of African farmers. To examine these questions, we use large-scale, panel experimental data from maize field trials throughout Malawi to estimate the expected physical returns to fertilizer use conditional on a range of agronomic factors and weather conditions. Using these estimated returns and historical price and weather data, we simulate the expected profitability of fertilizer application over space and time. We find that the fertilizer bundles distributed under Malawi’s subsidy program are almost always profitable in expectation, although our results may be reasonably interpreted as upper-bound estimates among more skilled farmers given that the experimental subjects were not randomly selected.

To better inform donor support for public food safety interventions, this paper reviews the literature on the impact of more stringent food safety standards on developing-country markets. This literature has primarily focused on the market access and economic implications of higher standards in export markets rather than on the extensive debate around market failure and public health benefits that dominates the literature in developed countries. We find that the market access benefits from compliance with public and private food safety standards are clear, as is the market exclusion that results from noncompliance. These benefits are now well documented, with more recent evidence pointing to added benefits of poverty reduction and spillovers for health and productivity. Rigorous evidence is also found concerning the positive role of technical assistance and public or donor support. Most of the literature, however, has focused on the relatively small market for EU horticultural products, which will provide opportunities for only a fraction of developing-country producers. This narrow focus causes important gaps in the literature informing meaningful public roles in addressing food safety in developing countries. Future research should examine and rigorously evaluate alternative models for how best to support improved food safety management outside of the export channels that have been the focus of the literature thus far. Further, evaluating the impact of public–private approaches on reduction in enforcement costs and improving compliance through supporting industry-led efforts would better inform donor support for food safety reforms, as would research among developing-country consumers with respect to food safety reforms and public health.