Study on Prevention of AfflatoxinContamination in Groundnut by AcceleratedPost-harvest Processes

摘要

Groundnut is one of important food crop commodities in Indonesia, which issusceptible to aflatoxin contamination. In tropical developing countries like Indonesia,Aspergillus flavus and Aspergillus parasiticus, both are cosmopolite fungals, growingin groundnut may produce aflatoxin B1, a suspected potential human carcinogen.Sampling of groundnut at some commercial level at 5 districts of 5 provinces showeddifferent contamination levels at farm and market, viz. about 0-26.65 ppb and 6.60-49.98 ppb, respectively. In this study, an experiment by introducing machineries onpost-harvest processing of groundnut was carried out to observe the aflatoxincontamination compared to the traditional technologies that farmers have beenapplying. Machineries used consist of groundnut thresher, flat bed dryer, groundnutsheller and vacuum packing sealer. The aflatoxin content at groundnut was analyzedby thin layer chromatography (TLC) method. Result showed that speeding up the postharvest processing activities resulted in absence of aflatoxin contamination within thegroundnut. In contrast, traditional processing technologies resulted in the presence ofaflatoxin in high contamination level. This experiment also noted that the hermeticstorage of groundnut showed better result than the vacuum pack storage.