Ho Chi Minh City will enhance supervision of food safety and issue harsh penalties on violators; moreover, violators will face criminal charges if they cause serious incidents and violators will be publicized names on the public media.

Sedative-injected pigs are detected in Xuyen A slaughterhouse in Ho Chi Minh City's  outlying district Cu Chi 

In its report to the Prime Minister on implementation of the PM’s guideline No.13/2016 on increasing supervision on food safety, the municipal People’s Committee said that inspectors have taken samples for testing and results showed that over 28 percent of samples failed to meet food safety standard.

In general, in the first nine months of the year, inspectors tested 31,449 cases and detected nearly 9,420 violations accounting for 30 percent.

Inspectors imposed 3,083 violations with total amount of VND12.5 billion ($550,044) and destroyed around 13,636 poultry and cattle excluding 3,750 sedative-injected pigs to be incinerated in early October, over 9.6 tons of cattle and poultry meat and more than 14 tons of veggies and different food.

Despite related agencies’ efforts in supervising, violations in the field have been still seen an increase. 

Ho Chi Minh City is the first city to build safe food chains to provide customers as well as adopt measures to trace back the origin of pork and vegetables yet city authority admitted that difficulties still exist.

At present, there have been no regulation that supervisors can keep commodities while waiting for test result; accordingly, when unsafe food can be sold out before test result is announced.

Therefore, inspectors can only give heavy fines to merchants who sell contaminated agricultural produces in wholesale markets.

SGGP