China Issues 13th Five-Year Plan for Food Safety

Food safety problems are rampant and rising in China. The development and application of new food technologies and processes as well as the discovery of new chemical contaminants and pathogenic micro-organisms in food are posing new challenges to the monitoring and assessment of food safety standards. Confronted with this new situation, the Plan calls for efforts to further advance the building of food safety standards. This includes the building of seven key laboratories for food safety risk assessment and standards development, the strengthening of the publicity, training, tracking and evaluation of standards, and the improvement of standards services by significantly raising the capability of the health and family planning administrations at or above the county level in providing counselling on food safety standards and other services.

Food safety risk assessment will go full steam ahead. Efforts will be made to form a relatively sound system of regulatory standards and technical guidelines for risk assessment, complete the sixth Total Diet Study and the building of a database covering the dietary intake and toxicology information of 24 major categories of food, complete the risk assessment of 25 risk factors in food, and launch the periodic reassessment of the key substances in food safety limits and standards.

On the monitoring of food safety risks, the Plan says that the government will further improve its ability to monitor food safety risks. Risk monitoring will be extended from county-level administrative zones to villages and towns and all disease prevention and control institutions at the provincial, city, prefectural and county levels are required to reach their respective monitoring standards. In the central and western regions, especially the poverty-stricken areas, the safety monitoring forces will be reinforced and their monitoring capability will be significantly improved.

For details of the Plan in Chinese, please see:

http://www.nhfpc.gov.cn/sps/s7885/201611/8c904a4efdb44bbca8d10d8d55f28a53.shtml