Infomag  ˇµ
Food Safety Policies
Aug / 2010

The EUCCK Food & Beverages committee and Alcoholic Beverages committee organized a special luncheon meeting with Mr. Noh Yun-hong, Commissioner of Korea Food & Drug Administration (KFDA) on July 9th.

The Korea Food & Drug Administration's vision is to establish advanced food and drug safety nation by securing public health and maintaining national competitiveness. It aims to protect and promote the health of consumers by ensuring the safety of foods, drugs, and medical devices while facilitating the competitiveness of the health industry in Korea.

KFDA is composed of Headquarters in Seoul, Regional Offices in 6 six cities, and one affiliated organization (NIFDS) with a total of 1,413 staff members.

In special luncheon meeting with EUCCK members, Mr. Noh Yun-hong, Commissioner of KFDA introduced and reviewed the overall food safety policies in Korea implemented by the Korea Food and Drug Administration for the year 2010.

Commissioner Noh mentioned that it is vitally important to protect public health by providing safe and reliable foods to consumers, while maintaining the balance of benefits of ensuring fair practices of international food trade. He pointed out the current food safety issues which are summarized as below:

Emerging challenges: Due to changes in food production environment, increasing volumes of imported foods, and rising public concern for the safety of foods, KFDA has been actively involved for the integrated and harmonized control of the safety of foods and drugs since 1998 to meet the emerging challenges.

Changes in the food trade environment: Food imports along with the volumes of international food trade in constantly increasing every year.

Increasing trade volumes between EU and Korea and EU-Korea FTA: Korea is the EU's eighth largest trade partner and the EU has become Korea's second largest export destination. EU trade with Korea already exceeded 65 billion Euros in 2008. The Free Trade Agreement between the EU and the Republic of Korea was settled last year, pending for final ratification. With the FTA, trade volumes of EU and Korea are expected to continuously increasing over the next decades.

Food Safety Policy – approaches: In order to ensure safe food, emphasis has been given to the higher level of consumer health and protection. Streamlining current legislation for global harmonization, and overall control from farm to table with enhanced traceability approaches has been widely applied along with the transparency and public participation for more comprehensive and integrated food safety control.

Global harmonization of standards: Continuous efforts has been given to the
global harmonization of the standards with the international standards such as Codex and other activities in various areas including HACCP.
New approaches - Automatic Sales Block at POS;
Last year, KFDA introduced the "Automatic Sales Block System at the Point of Sales (POS) using Barcode in cooperation with the Korea Chamber of Commerce. This system allows instant sales block at the retail stores around the nation when the testing results are issues in the testing laboratory. It takes less than 5 minutes to block the sales of the adulterated foods nationwide. KFDA will continue to keep on encouraging the retail stores to join the program for fast and reliable recall of the products found hazardous.
New risk management approaches: KFDA has also adopted the new "Prompt response and surveillance monitoring system" for better control of the product collecting and withdrawal. This system allows the headquarter of KFDA oversea the activities performed at local level on how many persons are completing their tasks on time at what level for faster and more efficient control of the inspection and surveillance.

Random sampling for product collection and testing: KFDA also introduced "Random sampling program using the latest Global Positioning System (GPS) for systematic sample collection over various retail stores. Government officials can select food manufacturing or retail facilities randomly chosen by the computer and could have the overall picture of the facilities that they wish to inspect or collect the samples in certain areas of Korea instantly.
Recent changes in Food Labeling policy: KFDA recently changed the food labeling policy to adopt the single enforcement date for newly adopted standards to minimize the burden of changing labels and unnecessary expenses caused by the change of food labeling standards. If the labeling standard revision is made 3 times this year, all three revision will be effective at the same date in the year 2012 so that the company does not have to change the food package each and every time. It is providing sufficient time for re-design and replace of the label and packages.

Speaking on food safety and labeling he said: ˇ°we will continue to communicate actively with all stakeholders to meet the current needs and demands of the private sectors with regards to food safety and labelingˇ±.