China will face the biggest food safety challenge

On April 18, at the International Conference on Food Safety and Health, 2019, organized by the Chinese Food Science and Technology Association and the International Food Science and Technology Alliance, experts said that the problem of "stock" in food safety in China had not yet been solved, and with the wave of food innovation, new problems were emerging in large numbers. China will face the biggest food safety challenge in the world. At present, China's food industry has entered a deep transition period oriented by "safety and health". In 2018, there were 40 793 food enterprises above the national scale, a large-scale decrease of 2037 compared with the previous year; the main business income was 8.1 trillion yuan, the growth rate was 5.3%, which was lower than the previous year's level; but the profit growth rate of the food industry was 10.8%, which was higher than the growth rate of output value by 5.5 percentage points. At the same time of industrial transformation, problems are also emerging. The State Administration of Market Supervision recently released information on food sampling, saying that the unqualified rate of food safety supervision and sampling dropped from 5.3% in 2014 to 2.4% in 2018, and the public's satisfaction with food safety has been greatly improved. However, with the emergence of new technologies, the food industry is still facing challenges. Professor Meng Suhe, chairman of the Chinese Food Science and Technology Association, said at the meeting that the structural transformation of China's food industry is taking effect in the form of value enhancement under the guidance of health and safety objectives and the "hand of the market". At the same time, many new food products and sales formats, such as traditional food such as spicy strips, new plant-derived food such as enzymes, functional food with unique Chinese style, old-age food with strong demand, and online food sales accounting for more than 30% of the national food market sales, have developed rapidly into a huge new economic sector of the food industry. At the same time, the import risk of food safety is also increasing after the opening of the National Gate.

"The problem of"stock"in food safety in China has yet to be solved one by one, and the contradictions between safety and health risk assessment, regulations and standards of innovative food brought about by the accelerated transformation of China's food industry in the wave of innovation will emerge in a large number of ways in which problems are superimposed. As the world's most dynamic food manufacturer and consumer, China is faced with the challenge of food safety and health, which is bound to be the biggest challenge of the global difficulty coefficient. Meng Suhe thinks. Chen Junzeshi, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and general consultant of the National Food Safety Risk Assessment Center, believes that the current food safety situation in China is stable, and foodborne diseases are the biggest food safety problem, but the pressure is not great. The harmfulness of negative public opinion is prominent and has become a major problem. In this regard, Patrick Wall, former chairman of the European Food Safety Agency and professor of Dublin University, Ireland, believes that digital media communication technology can help spread new food technologies and carry out popular science and rumors. Food scientists and food-related research institutions, as the authority of food science and technology, urgently need to learn and use new media technology. This is even more important in China. It is expected that Chinese food scientists will bring their advantages in digital media into food science popularization and lead their international counterparts in food information communication.

Wang Tiehan, Director of Food Safety of the State Administration of Market Supervision and Administration, said at the meeting that in recent years, China's food safety regulatory authorities have followed the principle of "prevention first, risk management, whole process control, social co-governance", constantly innovating supervision methods and supervising producers and operators to implement the main responsibility of food safety, basically forming market access as a condition and process supervision. On the basis of management, a food safety risk prevention and control system with sampling inspection and monitoring as the focus and early warning and communication as the link is put forward. He said that no country can be on its own to ensure food safety. Food safety needs to be faced by governments, international organizations and the whole society in many ways. It needs to improve the preventive mechanism and build a platform for communication to form global co-governance.