China’s Health Food And Cosmetics Supervision:The Situation And Policy

Since the reform and opening up, the living standard and quality of urban and rural residents in China has been greatly improved. In the context of people’s lives getting better, based on consumers’ demand for their own health and beauty, the Chinese health care products and cosmetics industry has made considerable progress during the last two decades. The annual sales of health care products market in China had reached 280 billion yuan during the 2012, and are expected to exceed 1 trillion in2015. While the China’s cosmetics market had ranked third in the world in 2010, and are maintaining a rapid growth rate of about 20% annually.Although the health care products and cosmetics market of China are accelerating and expanding rapidly in recent years, but compared with the market in other foreign countries, especially in Europe, Japan and South Korea, the market in China is still immature. The manufacturers are uneven and the supervision from government and industry organizations is also inadequate. All these reasons leds to the endless security incidents, flood of illegal production and repeated fake and shoddy products in China’s health care products and cosmetics market, which makes a huge threat to the vital interests of consumers.It is in this context; in 2013 the first meeting of the Twelfth National People’s Congress approved the further formation of the China Food and Drug Administration(CFDA), which responsible for the supervision and management of production,circulation and consumption of food(including health food and cosmetics) safety and drug safety.After the establishment of the CFDA, facing the new situation of health food and cosmetics market development, how should we sort out its deep-seated causes of the market chaos? How to effectively solve these problems? Are there any successful experiences of foreign countries we can learn from? How to guide the market into a virtuous circle by using government regulation? All these questions are the focus of this study. In general, this paper described the development process of China’s health food and cosmetics markets as well as the existing problems in the market level;Further, the paper introduced the current situation of China’s regulation on health food and cosmetics markets and the related successful experience of foreign countries;Finally, by comparing, analyzing and summarizing, this paper proposed several policyresponse recommendations for China’s health food and cosmetics market regulation on the policy research and government regulatory levels. These policy response recommendations including:(1) Further improve our health food and cosmetics-related laws and regulations;(2) Further develop the regulatory role of China Food and Drug Administration;(3) Adjustment of health food and cosmetics registration system;(4) Introduced electronic monitoring of health care products gradually,effectively tracing flow.(5) Strengthen the control of raw materials of health food and cosmetics,develop and improve the catalog and related standard of availabe raw materials;(6) Improve inspection system of relevant industry, strengthen the institutional capacity;(7) Accelerate the development of the relevant credit evaluation system;(8) Enhance the daily inspection, increase the punishment for related violations(9) Give full play to the role of industry associations(10) Strengthen consumers’ awareness, raise their awareness of rights...