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Cabinet drafts rule over Food Safety Law

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-03-02 07:43

The State Council is busy drafting a detailed rule for the new Food Safety Law to ensure its implementation from June 1, a senior legislator said during an online interview yesterday.

Related readings:  China adopts Food Safety Law  Food safety a top concern of lawmakers, advisors

It will "definitely" be announced before June and may include the role and responsibility of the planned national food safety commission, said Li Yuan, director of the administrative law division of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee's legislative affairs commission.

The rule will come into force together with the law, he said.

On Saturday, the NPC Standing Committee passed the long-awaited Food Safety Law after five years of deliberation. It will streamline the current food safety supervision mechanism and establish a national commission to direct regulations after a series of scandals affected consumer confidence.

The law also increases criminal and civil penalties for violations by food producers and managers, with cases where the management clearly know a company is selling below-standard food resulting in them having to compensate the consumer 10 times the price of the product.

Li said such new rules are to improve supervision and raise producers' awareness on food safety. "But as usual, most stipulations in the law are in principle and lack details. There must be a detailed implementation rule to go with it," Li said.

Experts spoke highly of the law and Luo Yunbo, a professor at China Agricultural University, said he considered the establishment of a national food safety commission the most important progress.

The country's current system of splitting food safety over different government departments has resulted in uneven enforcement; the commission is expected to improve coordination and eliminate loopholes, Luo said.

"In the Sanlu scandal, the most problematic section was the private milk-collecting stations. But under the current system no government agencies are responsible for such stations," he said.

The government said unscrupulous milk-collectors added the industrial chemical melamine into raw milk to give a false protein reading. The tainted milk killed six babies and sickened 30,000 others.

The seventh amendment to the Criminal Law, which aims to hand out stiffer punishments to government officials and their families convicted of taking bribes, and the revision of the Insurance Law also got nods from the legislators on Saturday.