Long An: Food safety strengthened for inspection, examination and post-examination

Vice Chairman of Long An Provincial People's Committee - Pham Tan Hoa praised the departments, branches and localities for proactively developing regulations to coordinate in performing tasks assigned to manage in the field of food safety.

Vice Chairman of the Provincial People's Committee - Pham Tan Hoa praised the departments, branches and localities for proactively developing regulations to coordinate the implementation of tasks assigned to manage in the field of food safety, then, the inspection and examination work achieved certain results. However, the rate of violations of the law on food safety after inspection at business and processing facilities is high, it indicates a very high risk of food contamination. In addition, the on-going disease on cattle and poultry is also a cause of food safety loss for agricultural, forestry and fishery products.

Vice Chairman of the provincial People's Committee said that there was an overlap in management due to unclear and specific regulations on food safety. In order to overcome this situation, in the coming time, especially in the year-end period, functional agencies in the province and localities need to effectively implement the coordination regulations in the state management of food safety; strengthening inspection, examination and post- examination on food safety to ensure food safety at all stages from production, import and circulation of food in the market to eliminate the risk of food contamination and food poisoning.

Reported at the conference, the provincial interdisciplinary Steering Committee on Food Safety said that in the past 9 months, there were 2 cases of food poisoning in the province (both occurred in Ben Luc district), the total number of people eating food is 971, the total number of people infected is 18. The cause of food poisoning is contaminated with microorganisms.

In 9 months, inspections, examination and post-examination were also implemented with 8 interdisciplinary delegations and 18 specialized delegations. 963 establishments were inspected, examined and post-examined, 234 of them violated and were fined nearly 1.3 billion VND.

The content of violations is mainly human conditions (owners’ establishment and people directly contacting with food do not check their periodic health examinations); product quality standards are not published; product quality is not guaranteed; violations against disease prevention, veterinary hygiene; the certificate of establishment meeting all conditions on food safety has expired, and no certificate of establishment meeting the conditions on food safety.

In addition, district and commune levels also organized over 200 delegations for inspection, examination and post-examination at more than 5,900 establishments. Thereby, 682 establishments that violated, sanctioned over 148 million VND. The major violations are the production, preliminary processing and processing site with the family living area; they have not implemented traceability yet; information are provided incompletely or not provided that affected traceability, etc.

Besides, the risk of food contamination is still high, there are 86 out of 888 samples of substandard products when the inspection team conducted rapid test or examination.

At the meeting, the departments also raised the situation and violations of the law in food production and processing in the province are popular now: Using additives, unknown materials, expiry date for food processing; slaughterhouses pumping water and sedating drugs before slaughtering pigs are still popular; The recording of cattle entry hours into slaughter facilities in some places is not strictly. Especially, delegates are interested in food safety in collective kitchens in school and for workers./.

By Mai Huong – Translated by Duc Tam

Source: http://baolongan.vn/long-an-tang-cuong-thanh-tra-kiem-tra-hau-kiem-an-toan-thuc-pham-a83940.html