Food safety post-inspection is identified as the core content in food quality management, in line with the advanced management trend of many countries. However, in Vietnam, post-inspection regulations are currently scattered in many legal documents, lacking unity, causing difficulties for implementation organization.
On January 9, the Ministry of Health organized a policy consultation conference on the draft Law on Food Safety (amended). This draft focuses on 5 major policy groups, including: strengthening the management of high-risk food production and business establishments; clearly decentralizing and decentralizing state management responsibilities for food safety; controlling pre-packaged processed food before circulation according to risk levels; controlling imported food based on risks and the history of legal compliance of enterprises; and at the same time strictly controlling substances used in food production and processing that are at risk of being abused or used for wrong purposes.
Dr. Chu Quoc Thinh - Acting Director of the Food Safety Department (Ministry of Health) - said that the Food Safety Law of 2010 and Decree 15/2018/ND-CP currently have many points that are not uniform and do not fully meet management requirements in practice. Amending the Law is necessary to strengthen the quality management system of food throughout from production to circulation and distribution.
According to Dr. Chu Quoc Thinh, the draft Law will supplement and improve regulations on quality control systems; improve testing capacity, product quality assessment; clarify the process of concluding whether products meet or do not meet requirements and the mechanism for recalling substandard food quickly and promptly.
A noteworthy new point is that the draft Law clearly assigns powers and responsibilities to the provincial-level People's Committee in organizing a focal agency for food safety management in the locality. Administrative procedures will be decentralized and delegated to the maximum extent, creating conditions for localities to proactively perform their assigned responsibilities and improve management efficiency.
In particular, the draft Law on Food Safety (amended) reserves a separate chapter for post-inspection work. This is an important change to unify the regulations currently scattered in many different documents.
Post-inspection work is very important and is a management model that many countries apply, typically the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Setting up a separate chapter for post-inspection will ensure consistency, synchronization and effectiveness of implementation," Dr. Chu Quoc Thinh emphasized.
For the field of food exports, especially agricultural, forestry and fishery products with a turnover of more than 65 billion USD per year, the Drafting Committee has supplemented regulations to strengthen the role and responsibility of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, the Ministry of Industry and Trade in controlling inputs of the food supply chain. Input factors such as pesticides, chemical residues, animal feed, fertilizers and risks arising during preliminary processing and processing are strictly managed according to an approach based on risk assessment.
Contributing opinions at the conference, Dr. Nguyen Huy Quang - former Director of the Legal Department, Ministry of Health - said that food safety management needs to be based on risk assessment by product groups, in which high-risk food groups must be strictly controlled from raw materials, production, business to import. He also proposed that there should be a unified management focal point from the Central Government, based on clear assignment, decentralization, and delegation of power to localities.
The Ministry of Health is continuing to collect opinions from ministries, sectors, localities and related units to complete the draft Law on Food Safety (amended), and soon submit it to the Government for consideration in the near future.
