Safe Food, Fair Food at Tropentag 2014

Tropentag is a major annual conference on tropical agriculture in Central Europe. This year, to mark 40 years of international livestock research, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) held a side event at the conference to showcase its work.

A poster on the Safe Food, Fair Food project was presented during a special ILRI poster session titled Participatory Research for Development to Upgrade Smallholder Pig Value Chains in Uganda (Ouma E, Roesel K, Dione M, Carter N, Pezo D, Ejobi F, Grace D). The poster shows how we integrated food safety into the overall assessment of constraints and opportunities in smallholder pig value chains in Uganda. The concluding part of the poster shows how we plan to turn research findings into practical use.

An MSc study from the previous Safe Food, Fair Food project phase was presented during the official Tropentag poster session. John Kago and colleagues showed the levels of Escherichia coli O157 serotype in beef carcasses post slaughterhouse in Nairobi and Eldoret, Kenya and identified poor practices (long transport times and non-functioning cold chains) as well as lack of knowledge (60% of the beef handlers have never been trained on hygiene) as major risk factors towards a higher level of E. coli O157 serotype at off-loading (2.4%) in comparison to 0.4% before loading onto transport trucks.

Seventeen ILRI staff participated in the Tropentag 2014 International Conference in Prague from 17-19 September 2014. See all the posters and presentations and visit ILRI’s RebelMouse site for a collection of materials presented there.

Follow the ILRI@40 celebrations here…