Individuals or organizations are prohibited from advertising substandard food products. Those advertising such products would face joint liability for damages incurred.

The law also prohibits any claim related to prevention or cure of illness on tonic food labels and instruction leaflets.

Call to centralize

"China's ineffective food safety management is caused by the administration of the system rather than any technological limitation," said Luo Yunbo, Dean of the College of Food Science and Nutritional Engineering at Chinese Agricultural University.

Luo, a leading expert on Chinese food safety who was consulted on three drafts of the Food Safety Law, told Beijing Review that the biggest breakthrough in the law comes with the installation of a national food safety commission to handle all issues related to the food supply.

China's 1995 Food Hygiene Law demanded that the Ministry of Health take charge of supervising and controlling food hygiene across the country. Following a surge in food safety problems in 2003, monitoring responsibilities since 2003 were divided among a dozen government departments, with each supervising one procedure from food production to consumption.

This system has been blamed for China's 2008 dairy products scandal, when formula tainted by the industrial chemical melamine left six infants dead and almost 300,000 sickened across the country. While the Ministry of Agriculture is responsible for China's cows and several ministries are involved in getting the milk to consumers, no department took charge of the milk collection stations, which added the melamine to deceive quality tests.

Luo believes that the Food Safety Law should have gone further to establish one single powerful body on food safety. He said the success of the new monitoring structure requires the food safety commission to undertake at least three tasks: formulating China's long-term food safety strategies as a preventive measure; supervising and coordinating the law enforcement of government departments involved in food safety; and deciding who is responsible for some issues in gaps or overlap between departments.

According to the new law, the Ministry of Health, where the national food safety commission will be based, is the primary agency entrusted with formulating standards, monitoring and appraising risks, releasing information and accident response. The Ministry of Agriculture, meanwhile, is responsible for the quality and safety of agricultural produce. The State Administration for Industry and Commerce is in charge of food safety during transportation and distribution and the State Food and Drug Administration is responsible for food safety in the catering sector. The General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine will be conducting food safety awareness campaigns.

Zheng Fengtian, a professor at Renmin University of China who participated in the Ministry of Science and Technology's food safety strategy program, said one of his biggest worries about the new law is whether the Ministry of Health is prepared to take on the leadership role.

Zheng told Beijing Review his research has indicated that, compared with the Ministry of Health, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine has much better resources to test food. "The Ministry of Health has yet to fix China's deeply flawed medical care system. I am not sure it has the ability to undertake another daunting task," Zheng said.

A rocky road ahead?

During a March 2 press conference on the Food Safety Law, Vice Minister of Health Chen Xiaohong admitted that administrative gaps and overlap are unavoidable in a monitoring system where government departments undertake responsibilities for different procedures separately.