Cabinet drafts rule over Food Safety Law

The State Council is busy drafting a detailed¹ rule for the new Food Safety Law to ensure its implementation² from June 1, a senior legislator said during an online interview yesterday.

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 administrative³ law division of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing⁴ Committee's legislative⁵ 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 streamline⁶ the current food safety supervision⁷ mechanism⁸ and establish a national commission to direct regulations after a series of scandals affected⁹ consumer confidence.

The law also increases criminal and civil penalties for violations¹⁰ by food producers and managers, with cases where the management clearly know a company is selling below-standard food, resulting in them having to compensate¹¹ the consumer 10 times the price of the product.

Li said such new rules are to improve supervision and raise producers' awareness¹² 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 spoke¹³ 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 uneven¹⁴ enforcement; the commission is expected to improve coordination¹⁵ 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 tainted¹⁶ milk killed six babies and sickened 30,000 others.

The seventh amendment¹⁷ to the Criminal Law, which aims to hand out stiffer punishments to government officials and their families convicted of taking bribes¹⁸, and the revision of the Insurance Law also got nods from the legislators on Saturday.