Agricultural associations jointly offer ideas to eliminate dirty food

Dirty food has been a long-standing problem, but to completely handle it, associations say that management agencies need to tighten post-inspection, instead of focusing only on administrative management.

Dirty food has been a long-standing problem, but to completely handle it, associations say that management agencies need to tighten post-inspection, instead of focusing only on administrative management.

Concerns about administrative procedures

The amendment of Decree 15/2018/ND-CP is an issue that has attracted the attention of the business community in recent times.

Issued in February 2018, Decree 15 details a number of articles of the Food Safety Law. The Decree is considered an effective reform model in food safety management, helping businesses save millions of working days and thousands of billions of VND per year.

In practice, during the years of implementing Decree 15, the food industry has had high growth even during the pandemic, contributing about 15% to GDP; 0.38 percentage points to GDP growth in 2021; 1 percentage point to GDP growth in 2022.

However, the Draft Decree amending Decree 15 - which has been widely consulted in the business community - is raising many concerns about increased administrative procedures, hindering production and business activities.

According to the Vietnam Dairy Association, many new proposals in the Draft aggravate all three groups of administrative procedures: Self-declaration of products, Registration of product declarations and Re-registration of declarations. This, according to the Association, is not consistent with the State's general policy of "strengthening simplification and shortening the time of administrative procedures, creating openness and maximizing the rights of enterprises".

For example, regarding re-registration procedures, the Draft stipulates 15 cases where changes must be re-registered (an increase of 12 cases), without classifying major or minor changes, which is not in line with risk management. Some cases are very unreasonable, hindering the progress of science, such as changes in testing methods must also be re-registered.

“Pharmaceutical management is very strict but still allows small changes that only require notification, major changes must be submitted for approval, only a few cases of very major changes must be re-registered,” the document of the Dairy Association emphasized.

In addition, many regulations in the Draft are also being assessed as unreasonable, for example the concepts of "food supplements", "functional foods introduced to the market for the first time"...

The draft stipulates that “Food supplements may only declare supplementary ingredients. Health claims or uses of supplementary ingredients may not be stated or announced.” Meanwhile, Circular 17/2023/TT-BYT of the Ministry of Health still allows food supplements to declare nutrient content claims and health claims if they comply with specific requirements.

Strengthening post-inspection is a solution to ensure food safety.

Need to focus on post-audit in practice

According to the Transparent Food Association, to address food safety issues, the Draft Amendment to Decree 15 should focus on post-inspection in practice, instead of just post-inspection on records.

Currently, many countries such as the US, China and the European Union (EU) focus on post-audit. Enterprises must comply by themselves and pre-audit only applies to production license registration and specific products (China), and does not require the declaration of conformity for all products like Vietnam.

Mr. Nguyen Van Chinh, Executive Committee Member of the Transparent Food Association, owner of Kim Son Farm (Hanoi) confided that fraudulent businesses will do better in terms of records than legitimate businesses. “Legitimate businesses are only concerned with making products and taking care of customers, which is tiring enough. As for fraudulent businesses, they have enough time and profit to make their records look good. If we only check the records, we cannot know whether the product is fake or real, but we need to add a post-inspection step in reality.”

According to Mr. Chinh, post-auditing not only puts pressure on businesses to "do the real thing", but also encourages consumers to trust in quality products and creates development opportunities for independent third-party testing and accreditation departments.

Similar to the opinion of the Transparent Food Association, the Vietnam Tea Association proposed that the Draft should strongly shift from pre-inspection to post-inspection of products on the market, thoroughly cutting down on administrative procedure bottlenecks.

In particular, the Draft needs to add a separate chapter on state inspection of street food, fresh food, and collective kitchens (the main cause of food poisoning); instead of just increasing administrative procedures for prepackaged food (which almost never causes food poisoning). This is the basis for overcoming the situation of “vegetables in two rows, pigs in two pens, meat soaked in chemicals”.

Most associations expect the Draft Amendment to Decree 15 to apply digital transformation in management, requiring food registration and declaration procedures to be carried out in an electronic environment.

The draft also needs to strengthen the responsibility of food management agencies, specify the responsibility of the head and the person directly implementing to strictly implement legal regulations, overcome "the situation of prolonged delays in handling, and requests for additional documents exceeding the number of times".

Dirty food has been a long-standing problem, but to completely handle it, associations say that management agencies need to tighten post-inspection, instead of focusing only on administrative management.

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