As predicted, the national reform of Vietnam’s food safety system, originally planned for an April 6 enforcement, has not come to fruition.
The government’s grand plan to implement changes to various guidelines in the local Law on Food Safety was planned for the April deadline, and would have seen stricter inspections of food production, customs inspections, e-commerce food safety management, product labelling and advertisement, all entailing tighter overall food safety management.
Unfortunately, a lack of ready infrastructure, manpower and food safety testing capabilities ultimately led to the failure of this implementation, after the country saw unmanageable delays and trade disruptions with thousands of containers stuck at ports or stranded across the country.
After a litany of abuse and accusations by local media and food businesses of causing near-total paralysis of the local food system, the Vietnamese Food Administration (VFA) under the Ministry of Health halted the changes until April 15 to conduct a review.
This was already a week after the original deadline, and VFA later published a new draft framework to make the guideline changes, but with the public only given five days from March 27 to March 31 to comment on it, this was not generally very well-received.
Rather unsurprisingly, in the most recent update on this saga, on April 6 VFA officially announced a full suspension of plans to overhaul the system, directing all food firms and supply chain players to revert back to the previous regulations that have been in play since 2018.
“At the request of the Ministers of Health, Agriculture and Environment, Industry and Trade, and Justice, the government has temporarily suspended [plans to] implement changes to guidelines in the Law on Food Safety,” then-Deputy Prime Minister Le Thanh Long said in a formal statement.
“This is a temporary suspension, until a resolution is reached on policy amendments to be made to the Law of Food Safety and the decree guiding this amendment come into effect.”
Policy changes to the Law of Food Safety would see a wider overhaul on the overall law that is supposed to include incentivisation for food safety investments and a decentralisation of food safety management.
This decentralisation would see various other ministries being roped in for different food types, such as drinking water and functional foods being the remit of the Ministry of Health, (MoH) but agricultural products going to the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) and alcoholic beverages to the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT).
These changes are expected to be submitted for government approval nearer the end of the year.
No laurel-sitting in the meantime
Given the temporary nature of this suspension, it is clear that the government still very much plans to move forward with tighter controls once the policy changes are approved.
As such, food firms operating in Vietnam or importing into the country have been urged to make use of the additional transition time no available to ready themselves for the changes to come.
The various ministries have also been mandated to prepare according to specific responsibilities assigned to them.
“It is still expected that the various ministries will work to strengthen the implementation of plans for inspections, monitoring, supervision, guidance, and handling of food safety violations during the production, export, import, and trading of food [during this temporary suspension],” Le said.
“In addition, MoH [is responsible for] handling food safety violations regarding declarations and advertisements; MoIT for violations such as counterfeit or smuggled foods and e-commerce-related fraud; and the Ministry of Science and Technology must strengthen supervision of organisations registered for accreditation such as food safety testing laboratories].”
