A video has been making the rounds — a market woman, visibly troubled, calling on the authorities to stop the importation of a chemical some of her colleagues use to ripen plantain, banana, pepper, and other produce. Her complaint was pointed: they sell it to the public, but they will not touch it themselves.

She did not defend the practice. She called it wicked. But her proposed solution — a ban on importation — deserves a closer look, because it may be aiming at the wrong target.

Here lies the bitter irony: we are advised, again and again, to eat more fruits and vegetables to stay healthy. Instead, some of us are falling ill from the very things we were told would save us.

What she is describing could be calcium carbide, known in our markets as “cambad” or “carbad” — though without lab testing, we cannot rule out that other concoctions are also in circulation. It is cheap, and it turns days of natural ripening into hours — which is precisely why it is tempting to a trader racing perishable goods to market. But calcium carbide was never invented for fruit. It has genuine, legitimate industrial uses — producing acetylene gas for welding, for instance.

Ghana’s Food and Drugs Authority has already banned its use in ripening food and has warned repeatedly against it. The chemical is not the crime; its diversion into our food chain is.

This is the same story with the palm oil scandal that made headlines a few years ago. The dye some traders use to make pale, poor-quality palm oil look richer and redder is an industrial colorant — meant for textiles, leather, and plastics — not for anything we eat. Health authorities have linked it to serious risks, including cancer, and it too is banned as a food additive.

So a blanket ban on importation misses the point twice over. These chemicals have honest jobs to do — in workshops, factories, tanneries — and banning them outright would hurt legitimate industries without necessarily stopping a determined trader from finding another shortcut. The question is not “how do we get rid of the chemical,” but “how did it end up in the hands of people ripening our bananas, and why does no one stop them at that point?”

This is the part we don’t ask loudly enough. Nobody wakes up and independently discovers that an industrial dye will make palm oil look more appetizing. Someone showed them. Someone sold it to them for that purpose, knowing what it would be used for.

If our authorities are serious, the investigation should not stop at the market stall — it should follow the supply chain backward to whoever is marketing these chemicals for food use in the first place, and it should include real public education for traders on the specific, documented harm this does: kidney damage, liver damage, and the kind of illness that shows up quietly, years later, in a hospital bed with no clear cause.

A question of conscience, not just commerce
But let us not pretend this is only a regulatory failure. Many of these market women are pillars of their churches and mosques — women who lead prayer groups, sing in choirs, teach Sunday school. Every faith tradition among us teaches some version of the same command: love your neighbour as yourself. Selling your neighbour sickness while keeping your own family’s plate clean is not a technical violation of food safety guidelines. It is a failure of that command, dressed up as ordinary business.

The irony should sting: you may never eat the plantain you ripened with carbide, but somebody’s mother, somebody’s child, will. And one day, so will someone you love — because these products do not stay confined to strangers.

For those who believe, there is a reckoning implied in the very scripture they teach their own children. Whatever you failed to do for the least of your neighbours, you failed to do for God himself. That is not a light thing to carry into a market stall each morning.

What should happen now
Authorities should do three things, and do them together: trace and sanction the supply of these chemicals into food markets, not just the importation broadly; educate traders plainly on the health consequences, in language and settings — market associations, church groups — where the message will actually land; and enforce stronger, consistent penalties for those who persist after being warned.

A ban that only chases the chemical will fail. A response that also chases the practice, and appeals to the conscience of the people involved, has a chance.

Our mothers in the market are not the enemy. But honesty and kindness are not optional extras to good business — they are the business. The healthiest thing any trader can offer a customer is simply this: I would not sell you what I would not feed my own family.

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Author: Felix Ekow Eshun

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