Four officials supervise food safety for eight million people
Thailand’s Bangkok city has 5000 food safety inspectors while Vietnam’s largest city — HCM City – has only four inspectors, said the HCM City Health Department chief, to explain the poor food hygiene and safety control situation in the city.
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| Lack of staff, it is hard for HCM City to control food hygiene and safety. |
Chau was questioned by the HCM City People’s Council on July 8 about some burning issues such as food safety and disease control.
The official admitted that food safety was not controlled well but he explained that HCM City has only four inspectors, the highest such number of any locality in Vietnam. According to Chau, each province and city in Vietnam has a mere 0.5 food safety inspectors on average.
Chau said the Health Department is training an additional 26 inspectors.
“There is a huge gap between Vietnam and the world. Bangkok has 5000 inspectors; Japan has 33,000 and China has 55,000. We plan to have 800 by 2012 but I’m not sure when this issue will be entirely solved. We are trying our best,” Chau said.
A deputy questioned the Health Department’s chief about the fate of vegetables with chemical residues.
Chau said that the lifespan of vegetables and fruits is limited while the testing time is long. By the time the test results are available, the products have been sold already. “But we have solutions to reduce the volume of food with high chemical residues thanks to product origin warnings,” Chau added.
Source:Vietnamnet.vn
