Research On The Reform And Innovation Of China’s Food Safety Regulatory System

Food is the basic material condition for the survival and development of human beings. However, in recent years food safety incidents occur frequently and food safety issue has become a key problem in the society, which not only attracts the wide attention of people from all levels of society, but also has a negative impact on the development of foreign trade of our food industry. The reason for the frequent occurrence of food safety issue is not merely the inadequate supervision of individual government department or illegal activities and foul play of food practitioners. The underlying cause is that there are a lot of defects in food safety supervision system in our country. At present our food safety supervision system takes the form of "relying mainly on sectional supervision while making variety regulation subsidiary". The system involves multiple supervision departments and there is not strong coordinating organization and necessary coordination mechanism among them, which lead to coexistence of duplicated regulation and regulatory gaps in the process of food security supervision. The paper takes food safety supervision system as the object of study, uses the theory of public goods and the tragedy of anti-commons, and expounds that since food safety is a public product, the government should be its final provider. The paper states the multiple changes and transition process of the food safety supervision system since the founding of our country, explains the current situation, characteristics and harm of food safety, points out the problems existing in the current food safety supervision system adopting "relying mainly on sectional supervision while making variety regulation subsidiary", and analyses the causes. Combining my practices in Tianjin Binhai New Area, the paper also illustrates the difference between the food safety system in Tianjin Binhai New Area and that in our country in organization setting, function distribution and operating mechanism, shows that health supervision and management department is responsible for the supervision of catering enterprises in Tianjin Binhai New Area, which is inconsistent with Food Safety Law, and the false subject of law enforcement makes it impossible to promptly place the enterprises breaking the law on file for investigation, and states that vertical management mechanism of food and drug supervision departments is still maintained, which is also not in accordance with Food Safety Law and leads to buck-passing of food supervision responsibility between food and drug supervision department and local government. The paper uses method of comparative analysis to discuss horizontally the food safety supervision mechanism in the US, Japan, Denmark, Canada and other developed countries, takes the experience of developed countries in this area as reference, and offers proposals on food safety supervision system reform in our country, which include:1. We should scientifically build up food safety supervision system, reorganize and integrate current food safety supervision departments, reduce the difficulty of coordination between departments, carry out competitive supervision between supervision departments, and make every supervision department responsible for food safety, not for some segments of supervision.2. We should sort out and improve industry standards and system of laws and regulations on food safety. Thus food safety supervision departments have laws to abide by while investigating and punishing the cases violating laws and regulations.3. Construction of auxiliary supervision institutions should be strengthened, which includes building up independent complaint center where all complaints are centralized and attended to and are distributed to corresponding supervision departments by means of files. Supervision departments reply to complaint center also by means of files after completing supervision work. In this way complaint cases are dealt with more effectively and casualty of law enforcement is avoided. Meanwhile, we should improve the inspection capability of food and drug inspection center and avoid insufficient evidence in law enforcement cases caused by substandard inspection capability.