China
In February, the State Council of China released details on the 13th Five-Year Plan on Food Safety (2016–2020). The Plan indicates that by the end of 2015, 135,000 food producing companies had been established, 8.19 million circulating companies and 3.48 million catering service companies. Above-scale food companies produced CNY 11.35 trillion ($1.65 trillion) that year, with yearly growth of 12.5%, and the value of food imports and exports increased 23.9%.
Although the Plan indicates that great strides in food safety were made by the end of the 12th Five-Year Plan, there are still numerous problems plaguing the industry, such as environmental pollution, inappropriate usage of agricultural inputs, the large number of small-sized producers, a lack of food safety standards and inadequate regulation and enforcement. The 13th Five-Year Plan aims to address these issues through increasing sample testing to cover all types of food; enforcing a more regulated and efficient governance of contaminated resources; re-implementing on-site inspections through developing a professional inspection team and standardizing inspection procedures and paperwork; and aligning food safety standards in China to those of international countries. Through creating a database of food safety standards of other countries and conducting R&D, China will work to improve the system for food safety by developing and updating at least 300 standards; and developing and assessing 6,600 maximum residue limits for pesticides, and 270 for veterinary drugs.
The country aims to create standards to cover all foods, including agricultural and dietary foods for “special population groups,” by 2020. To help implement this, China will establish a legislative system for food safety as well as revamp the Agricultural Product Quality and Safety Law, the Implementing Rules of the Food Safety Law and the Administrative Rules for Pesticides, among others. Foreign food safety systems will be subject to inspections, both imported and exported food will undergo more rigorous inspection, and retrospective reviews will be undertaken of food safety systems of the top 50 countries that export foods to China. Additionally, the Plan states that China will update the list of non-food-use substances and prohibited pesticides that are illegal to use as food additives.
