Vietnam Strives to Enhance Crackdown on Food Safety Violations

Vietnam will take measures to tighten control over food safety this year, including imposing strict fines for violators as well as publicizing their names in order to ensure costumers’ right to access to safe food, said Deputy Minister of Health Nguyen Thanh Long. The Vietnamese deputy minister made his announcement after the country recorded 131 serious food poisoning cases last year, which affected 4,300 people and 30 of them died, according to the government’s statistics. The Ministry of Health and local authorities across the nation will organize inspection teams to regularly check quality of foodstuff in supermarkets and wet markets through the year, which had been named the Year of Food Safety to raise awareness about the need to control food product quality. In another effort to make food safer in 2015, the Ministry of Health planned a pilot program, under which ward and commune inspection teams would be placed in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to examine food suppliers and deal with regulation violators. “Those sub-district inspection teams will be granted the ability to impose direct fines on the violators,” Long said. “This is a radical idea we are rushing to implement as soon as possible.” Sub-district inspectors would supplement inspection teams already in place at the national level, in the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Industry and Trade. Related ministries would focus on reducing antibiotic and pesticide use in meat and vegetables sold in Hanoi and HCM City, said Nguyen Nhu Tiep, head of the National Agro-Forestry Fisheries Quality Assurance (Nafiqad) under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. Violations of food safety regulations are at an alarm level, according to local media. Last year, more than 600 teams from the Hanoi Department of Health collected VND3 billion ($142,800) in fines during inspections of markets, shops and supermarket chains, said department’s Deputy Director Hoang Duc Hanh. The Department of Industry and Trade in Hanoi said it detected and handled 246 violations last year. It destroyed goods worth about VND1 billion and imposed fines of VND1.5 billion. (Vietnam News Feb 5)