Editorial
Toxic tastes
Calls for coordinated action
Food is the basic necessity for life and there is nothing worse than adulterating it. Yet, many fruit orchard owners, traders and distributors are unabashedly ripening and preserving the natural produce using all kinds of unnatural chemicals. A mobile court has recently destroyed around 30,000 toxic bananas in Pabna Sadar upazila. But it's only one of many such cases.
This being the height of mango season, calcium carbide comes in to play with all its black magic to ripen and colour the fruits.
But then, a lot of these practitioners in the vice when asked don't know just how harmful carbide is. It readies fruits in a day to be shipped for a quick buck. Carbide, if consumed, can damage kidney, heart and liver and cause ulcer and gastric, according to experts.
Maybe the food adulterators are not aware of the range of risk involved or maybe they just don't care. And this isn't helped at all by pharmacies selling calcium carbide to just anyone with the requisite number of currency notes.
The government needs to reach out to these fruit adulterators and educate them more exhaustively about the long term lethal effects of such selfish gains. Not only that, horticulturists need to acquaint them with the natural cycles of plucking the fruits and their maturity. What is the difference between money made in May and that in June? Perhaps there is an issue of storage to be addressed.
Once these precautionary steps are in place, the rule of law must be applied in full force against the errant traders. After all, the right to safe food is one of the most fundamental of human rights.
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