<p align="justify">A fast and inexpensive technology that detects and manages natural and potentially deadly poison, aflatoxin, which infects crops via a common fungus that makes them unfit for consumption, have been designed.</p>
<p align="justify">Scientists at the International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), devised the fast, simple and affordable test kit for detecting the poison. Aflatoxin is produced by a fungus that can easily grow on many crops including maize, groundnut, sorghum, and cassava.</p>
<p align="justify">The new detection kit developed by ICRISAT has changed the situation by cutting the cost of testing crops from $25 to $1 per sample. It’s available as a small, simple kit that can be used even for most remote rural farms to monitor grains and nuts and improve storage techniques to avoid serious contaminations. The end result is safer products for consumers and higher returns for African farmers.</p>
<p align="justify">In a statement made available to <em>Daily Independent</em>, Director General of ICRISAT, Dr. William Dar, said: "We have put another strong weapon in the hands of poor farmers to fight a problem that was making it particularly hard for African agricultural products to get fair treatment in international markets."</p>
<p align="justify">The test uses what scientists call an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay or ELISA test, to rapidly detect the presence of aflatoxin.</p>
<p align="justify">In Malawi, which saw its status in the 1970s as a major groundnut exporter eroded by aflatoxin outbreaks, the National Small Farmer Association of Malawi (NASFAM) has successfully used the new aflatoxin detection kit.</p>
<p align="justify">"Testing groundnuts has worked as a monitoring tool to ensure that buyers do not get produce with higher aflatoxin concentrations than their market requirements, or specifications," Moses Siambi, an ICRISAT scientist based in Lilongwe, said.</p>
<p align="justify">Aflatoxin is the toxic waste product of two fungi, Aspergillus flavus and Aspergillus parasiticus, which occur naturally in air and soil.</p>
<p align="justify">Several CGIAR-supported centres, including ICRISAT, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre, and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), are putting into place a range of innovative practices to combat aflatoxin contamination in maize, groundnut, sorghum, cassava, pistachio, almonds, and chilli peppers. In addition to the detection test, the techniques include efforts to control the toxin using bacteria as a bio-control agent, breeding crops that are resistant to aflatoxin, and changing cultivation practices to limit opportunities for contaminations.</p>
<p align="justify">Recent field trials led by Dr. Ranajit Bandyopadhyay, an IITA plant pathologist, have employed strains of atoxigenic Aspergillus to eliminate their highly toxic relatives, and in doing so to reduce aflatoxins. The atoxigenic strains were able to reduce aflatoxin contamination by up to 99.8 per cent in field trials.</p>
<p align="justify">More than five billion people in developing countries are constantly exposed to aflatoxins by unknowingly consuming contaminated foods.</p>