Nghe An will 'tighten' management and control of food safety from provincial to communal levels.

On the afternoon of August 12, the Provincial People's Committee held a meeting to listen to and give opinions on the draft Project "Improving State management capacity on food safety in Nghe An province until 2025". Comrade Le Ngoc Hoa - Vice Chairman of the Provincial People's Committee chaired the meeting. Attending were representatives of leaders of departments, branches, sectors and localities in the province.

Overview of the meeting. Photo: Thanh Chung

Nghe An currently has about 34,800 food production, trading and processing establishments. Of these, the Health sector manages 6,210 establishments, the Agriculture sector manages 12,000 establishments and the Industry and Trade sector manages 16,600 establishments. The total number of food production and trading establishments certified to meet food safety conditions is 3,519 establishments; 18,133 establishments have signed a commitment to ensure food safety.

Although the province has successfully built a number of safe food chains, in general, food production, trading and processing in the province are still mostly small-scale and fragmented. The production and trading of poor quality food products and food safety violations still occur and are a concern for the people.

The cause of this situation is due to the shortcomings and limitations in food safety management. To overcome this, the Provincial Party Committee Standing Committee has issued 2 Directives on strengthening leadership and direction on food safety issues in the new situation in the province; The Provincial People's Committee has issued many directives, decisions, implementation plans and directed the development of a draft Project "Improving the capacity of state management on food safety in Nghe An province until 2025" with the goal of improving the capacity of state management on food safety from the provincial level to the commune, ward and town levels. The project is expected to start implementation from 2020...

Commenting on the draft, delegates focused on developing solutions to improve state management capacity on food safety, including: Increasing sanctions, especially for repeat offenses; allocating annual budgets with specific spending lists for each activity, especially for propaganda activities; mobilizing the participation of the people.

Comrade Le Ngoc Hoa requested the Drafting Committee to quantify the goals and clearly affirm the role of district and commune levels in the project. Photo: Thanh Chung

The Vice Chairman of the Provincial People's Committee assigned the Department of Health - the drafting agency to receive comments to complete the draft, and submit it to the Provincial People's Committee at the regular meeting in August. The draft project needs to clearly assess the current status of food safety work, the roles and responsibilities of state management agencies; affirm the particularly important roles and responsibilities of district-level agencies, especially the roles of commune-level officials and food safety collaborators in communes; clearly quantify the goals in each field to strive for implementation./.