Food safety law comes in to force in China

China’s first comprehensive Food Safety Law entered into force on 1 June 2009.

The new legislation, which has been under consideration for a number of years, aims to strengthen China’s food safety regime and meet consumer requirements for safer food.

This follows a number of widely reported food safety incidents in China.  The Law applies elements of a scientific and risk assessment-based approach to food safety and includes commitments to transparency, public information and consumer rights. 

A strong focus on monitoring, surveillance and enforcement also underpins the new Law.

A new state level Food Safety Commission, responsible for overall supervision and monitoring has been established, comprising the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Agriculture, General Administration for Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ), the State Food and Drug Administration and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce. 

Individual agencies remain responsible for specific aspects of food safety supervision and regulation. 

Although the new law is now in force, regulations and procedures for putting it into practice have either yet to be created or remain in draft form.  As a result, it is not clear what changes, if any, will apply to food exports to China. 

It is not clear, for example, what references in the law to exporters having to register with Chinese agencies will mean in practice. 

The New Zealand government is monitoring the situation, and is emphasizing the principle of 'equivalence' to the Chinese authorities: that the sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) provisions of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the NZ-China Free Trade Agreement allow China to recognise the regulatory controls and food safety standards of an exporting country as equivalent to it's own, therefore eliminating the need to duplicate food safety measures.