Another 23 significant outbreaks of mass food poisoning have occurred nationwide so far this year, resulting in 12 deaths and 686 people being hospitalized, according to department statistics.
Ministry of Health analysis last year found that 3% of fruit samples contained residues of plant protection drugs, with Chinese red apples, pears and mandarin oranges seeing the highest contamination rate. Nearly 41% of samples of meat and meat-based products contained salmonella, bacteria causing digestive diseases.
Last month’s conference launched a Month of Action for Food Safety and Hygiene, which took place from April 15 to May 15, under the slogan of “retaining business commitment to food safety and hygiene.” During the campaign, 11 inspection teams with representatives from the ministries of Agriculture and Rural Development, Industry and Trade, Science and Technology, and Health were set up to check food quality in 33 cities and provinces, focusing on existing management problems and violations of food safety regulations in food production and distribution.
Khan pointed to the ongoing risks of unsafe food in light of poor control over food production, processing and supply, which were mostly conducted on a small scale with outdated technology that often failed to meet safety and hygiene requirements.
A lack of food safety inspectors directly contributed to the lax control over food poisoning and digestive diseases, he said. Food Safety and Hygiene Department statistics showed that there were just 230 food inspectors nationwide, while an estimated 12,000-15,000 were needed.
Although food safety and hygiene sub-departments were established in all provinces and cities nationwide, they each averaged a staff of only 11 against a need of 20-30.
Annual spending on human resources in the sector was merely VND 780,000 (USD 41)/person, 5% of the amount Thailand spent on environmental health.
Meanwhile, violations of food safety regulations were common. According to a report to review the national target program on food safety and hygiene, violations included failures to meet hygiene requirements (30%), announce product standards (30%), providing training in food safety and hygiene for food producers and traders (30-35%), possess certificates of food safety and hygiene (90%), and properly label goods (10-30%).
Rampant violations were a result of light penalties, with criminal cases related to food safety only making up 0.05% of the total cases handled by courts in 2004-08. In 2007, 61% of violators of food safety regulations in Ho Chi Minh City were only subject to a caution and just 8.6% were forced to destroy products. The rate of violators subject to closure stayed at a modest 0.44%. Yet, inspection results showed that 70% of the city’s 28,000 food producers and traders failed to meet hygiene requirements.
Legal documents on food safety were overlapping while failing to clearly define the responsibilities of concerned authorities. Over 1,000 documents issued by central and local agencies still lacked specific regulations, such as designation of a key agency for food safety inspection or setting contamination limits for food products.
Unsafe food control just meant handling cases already disclosed by the press, said Dr. Tran Tuan, director of the Research Center for Community Training Development under the Vietnam Union of Science and Technology Associations.
Although the ministries of Agriculture and Rural Development, Industry and Trade, and Health were jointly responsible for food safety and hygiene, these ministries were administering on a case-by-case basis without smooth coordination, Tuan told the online news service VietnamNet.
He pointed to the absence of a coordinating agency to control food safety and that no agency took final responsibility once a food scandal broke out even though the National Steering Committee for Food Safety and Hygiene consisted of representatives of over 10 ministries.
Food safety needed to be controlled from production through processing and distribution rather than at the stage of testing and sanctioning violations, which were neither cost nor time effective, Tuan said.
He said planners should view the current lack of food safety as a threat to the public, and a direct cause of poverty (due to the huge costs of the disease burden), and it reflected the irresponsibility towards the younger generation.
The National Assembly was expected to pass the Law on Food Safety at its May session in a bid to complete legal framework for food safety.(VLLF)-