Premier Lin Chuan said today that the government's five-point food safety policy is designed to ensure that every step in the supply and demand chain for food products meets sanitation, environmental and safety standards.
Recent food safety incidents have shown how the third component of the food safety policy—strengthening inspections to proactively find problems, and the fifth component—encouraging public oversight, have helped achieve more effective food quality controls.
The premier spoke after Cabinet meeting briefings by the Office of Food Safety, Environmental Protection Administration (EPA), Council of Agriculture, Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW) and Ministry of Education (MOE) about government food safety policy achievements to date.
To help control quality at the source, the first component of the food safety policy, the government has set up a Toxic and Chemical Substances Bureau under the EPA. The second policy component, rebuilding the food-production management system, was designed to make food production and distribution more transparent.
To do that, the government is promoting a system that consists of four quality certification labels and a QR code. The system is initially being promoted in schools, tracing product histories to make production and distribution processes more transparent.
Briefing the premier about cross-agency efforts to promote the labeling and tracing system for school lunches, the MOE said that pilot programs ran in 986 schools in six cities and counties cities during the second semester of the 2016 school year, benefitting 500,000 students. About 1.7 million students from 3,370 schools in 19 cities and counties are expected to benefit during the first semester of this year.
The MOHW reported that under its policy to improve the hygiene and safety of both imported and domestic food products by strengthening inspection mechanisms, the pass rate for random testing of both types of products in 2016 rose to 98.1 percent and 96 percent, respectively.
The ministry also reported that uniform standards for imposing fines and penalties have been set pursuant to Article 44, paragraph 1 of the Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation, including provisions covering the number of violations and illegal factory operations. These provisions are designed to ensure that vendors of adulterated food products are held responsible for their actions.
Government efforts to encourage citizen participation in overseeing food safety compliance by the MOHW have also had the desired effect, with a dedicated hotline logging a total of 83,000 calls to register complaints or seek consultations since December of 2015, and public informants have recently helped uncover 9 major food safety violations.