Fish Smoking Ovens Designed To Reduce Contaminants, Wood
If you happen to visit Dockyard Quarters in Limbe, the beach front at Idenau or some other fish smoking community along that coast, you will, certainly, be amazed by the large plumes of smoke that keep drifting skyward from the smoking barns.
Piled within the vicinities of these smoking barns, are tons and tons of wood logged from mangroves that skirt the sea front and some from the rubber plantations around. The wood is what thousands of the fish ‘smokers’ – a bulk of them women – use to turn the tons and tons of fresh marine life to varying degrees and types of the dark brown stuff found in many of Cameroon’s local markets and beyond.
A researcher with Cameroon’s Research Station, IRAD Batoke, has disclosed that a good lot of the fish smoked in Cameroon tends to harbour a lot of contaminants owing to the kinds of wood used and handling; the long time it takes to smoke, the humid conditions among other factors. George Divine Eyabi Eyabi told The Post that IRAD has designed smoke ovens that take shorter time for the smoking process; uses less wood and considerably reduces or leaves the fish monger free from some of the hazardous contaminants.
WorldFish/C. Finegold