Research On The Governmental Regulation Of The Illegal Use Of Food Additive

Food additive has a long history, just like the human civilization. Food additivemanages to drive food manufacturing out of the workshop and push it tocommercialization. So food additive can be treated as the soul of modern foodindustry. To use food additives scientifically can not only make food good in color,flavor and taste, but also contribute to nutrition and appetite improvement. Statisticsshow that there are more than25,000kinds of food additives all over the world, andnearly1000kinds are frequently used.Recent years, as the exposure of a large number of food safety events, melamine,clenbuterol and plasticizer have come into people’s eyes because of the illegal use ofthem. The safety of the food additives get into an unprecedented panic. Actually, sofar the food safety accidents all have been caused by the illegal use of food additives.Thus, it is extremely urgent to strengthen the supervision of food additives.Food additive does not have food ingredients, so it is different from theregulation of food. To supervise food additives, it is more important to supervise theuse of it. To sum up, there are two aspects about the illegal acts of food additive: oneis the illegal addition, such as the forbidden or unauthorized material andindustrial-grade additives; the other is the illegal act in the amount and quality of foodadditives.Under the condition of the whole environment of food safety, the failure of supervision attributes to the incomplete of supervision mechanism and the unequalityof public law enforcement resources. Considering the particularity of food additives,the failure of supervision is the result of the lag of food additives standard andmeasurement technique, and the early detection of potential illegal addition.Since the institutional reform of the state council, centralizing regulatory patternhas been established, and it meets the tendency of developed countries. According tothe advanced experience abroad, in order to strengthens the supervision of foodadditives, the follow measures should be taken:(1) improvement the departmentcoordination under the new system;(2) strengthen the food additive standard,measurement technique and the construction law enforcement capacity;(3)summarize the list of illegal additives during law enforcement;(4) publish theregulatory information to the masses and encourage different social sectors toparticipate in public scrutiny of food additives safety. The farthest benign regulatoryshould be carried out to minimize the safety risk of food additives and to guaranteepeople’s lives and health.