香料汙染帶來農業變革----中壢英文補習班－金學堂英語的部落格

Tainted Spices
Bring Farming Changes

【By GARDINER HARRIS／陳世欽譯】

IDUKKI, India — Spices grown in the mist-shrouded Western
Ghats here have fueled wars, fortunes and even the discovery of continents, and
for thousands of years farmers harvested them in the same traditional ways.
Until now.

Science has
revealed that instead of improving health, spices sometimes make people very
sick, so Indian officials are pushing changes in the way farmers pick, dry and thresh
their bounty.

The United States
Food and Drug Administration will soon release an analysis that pinpoints
imported spices, found in just about every kitchen in the Western world, as a
potent source of salmonella poisoning.

In a study of more
than 20,000 food shipments, the food agency found that nearly 7 percent of
spice lots were contaminated with salmonella, twice the average of all other
imported foods. Some 15 percent of coriander and 12 percent of oregano and
basil shipments were contaminated, with high contamination levels found in
sesame seeds, curry powder and cumin. Four percent of black pepper was
contaminated.

Each year, 1.2
million people in the United States become sick from salmonella . More than
23,000 are hospitalized and 450 die.

Mexico and India
had the highest share of contaminated spices. About 14 percent of the samples
from Mexico contained salmonella, the study found, a result Mexican officials
disputed.

India’s exports were the second- most
contaminated, at about 9 percent. But India ships nearly four times the amount
of spices to the United States that Mexico does.

In India, the
world’s largest producer, consumer and exporter of spices, government
officials are taking Washington’s concerns seriously. “The world wants safe spices, and we are
committed to making that happen,” said Dr. A. Jayathilak, chairman of the
Spices Board of India .

Illnesses caused
by spices are hard to trace. But new DNA sequencing of salmonella types is
allowing officials to pinpoint spices as a cause of outbreaks, including one in
2010 involving black and red pepper that sickened more than 250 people in 44
states.

The United States
is one of the world’s largest spice importers, bringing in 326 metric tons in 2012 valued
at $1.1 billion, according to its Department of Agriculture. Of those imports,
which account for more than 80 percent of the total United States spice supply,
19 percent were from India and 5 percent from Mexico.

New rules allow
the agency to restrict food imports if it even suspects the food is unsafe.

On a tour through
a tropical landscape teeming with pepper and cardamom farms , Indian spice
officials showed some voluntary changes they are pushing.

The first stop was
Noble Joseph’s four-hectare pepper farm, several hours from the port city of Kochi,
in the state of Kerala. Mr. Joseph’s hilly farm is dominated by slim silver
oaks and erythrina trees planted every 2.4 meters; each tree is encircled by
four or five pepper vines.

During harvest
season, workers use bamboo ladders to pluck the pepper seeds from the vines as
high as 12 meters.

Pepper farmers
used to dry the seeds on bamboo mats or dirt floors and then gather them for
manual threshing. Dirt, dung and salmonella were simply part of the harvest, so
much so that in 1987, the F.D.A. blocked shipments of black pepper from India.
The ban was lifted two years later, after the Indian government began a testing
program.

Now, the Josephs
boil their harvest in water to clean the kernels, and to speed drying and
encourage a uniform color. They are then placed on tarps spread over a concrete
slab with nets above to catch bird droppings. Ovens would be even more
sanitary, but ovens and electricity are expensive “and sunlight is free,” Mr. Joseph said.

At another spice
farm, in the village of Chemmanar, Bipin Sebastian is transitioning to organic
farming in hope of earning a premium price for his pepper, cloves, cardamom,
turmeric and coffee.

“We used to put our pepper directly on the ground,” Mr. Sebastian said, adding, “Now, we put down tarps and netting over it
to protect it from the birds. And I’ve been getting a higher price. It’s been great.”