From the Malaysian Star:

THE annual meeting of the Codex Committee on Food Labelling (CCFL) was held in Ottawa during the first week of May. Hosted by the government of Canada, the 36th meeting of CCFL was attended by close to 300 delegates representing 72 member countries, one Member Organization, European Community and 27 international organisations…

After almost 50 years, the Programme has established the Codex Alimentarius (Latin, meaning food law or food code). This is a collection of standards, codes of practice, guidelines and other recommendations that serve to provide guidance to governments for their respective national food control systems. It aims to achieve international harmonisation in food quality and safety requirements.

More than 200 specific commodity standards for individual foods or groups of foods have been developed. In addition, a number of horizontal standards have been published to cover general topics, including food labelling, nutrition and foods for special dietary uses, food additives, contaminants and methods of analysis and sampling…

A full report of the 36th Session of CCFL can be obtained from www.codexalimentarius.net/web/index_en.jsp in the next few weeks.

More information can be found by clicking on the links.

A new food safety law may be coming to China. China Daily explains:

The draft food safety law submitted to China’s top legislature for first review Wednesday proposes the establishment of a State-level food safety risk evaluation committee…

The draft law, to replace the existing Food Hygiene Law, also proposes a labeling system making food producers responsible for statements about ingredients, additives, expiration dates and functions on user manuals and packages. A recall system and a food safety information release system are also proposed.

In addition, the draft law seeks to impose strict examinations on food imports and exports…

“We expect the next government, to be in power next March, to make some concrete changes in reforming the system.”

Click on the above link for the full article.