Recently, three departments, including the General Office of the National Health Commission ("NHC"), have distributed the Work Plan on the Follow-up Evaluation of Food Safety Standards (the "Plan").
The Plan states that, with the focus on establishing the most rigorous standards, follow-up evaluations will be conducted to learn about the execution of these standards and discover flaws existing in current standards, with a view to providing a reference for future efforts to enact and revise standards and improve the system of China's national food safety standards. To this end, the Plan clarifies how to work for this purpose and what work will be performed. First, specific opinions on and proposals for each set of standards will be extensively solicited through the follow-up evaluation and feedback platform for national food safety standards. Second, food safety standards will be quantitatively scored according to the category of food products, during the follow-up evaluation. Third, efforts will be organized in a centralized manner to seek opinions on standards to be amended or on key standards. The Plan states that, a special evaluation will be performed under the quantitative scoring method for the standards in each category of food products, to horizontally look at the scientificity, applicability and completeness of food safety standards for different categories of food products.