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"Food is the God of the people." In recent years, food safety has been a major concern. At the National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) this year, Prof Gan Huatian, a member of the CPPCC National Committee and a professor of the West China Hospital of Sichuan University, paid attention to the issue of food safety and put forward relevant suggestions.

Professor Gan Huatian said that at present, China has taken a series of major initiatives on food safety, the food safety situation has been improving, and the public's consumer confidence has continued to rise.

However, China's food safety work is still facing a lot of difficulties and challenges, such as the low cost of violation of the law, the high cost of rights, the merchants are not strong awareness of the main responsibility; e-commerce and other new forms of business brought about by takeaways, online purchases of food of varying quality.

To this end, he makes the following recommendations:

Firstly, to implement a stricter penalty mechanism. Professor Gan Huatian suggested revising the Food Safety Law and its supporting regulations to impose severe penalties such as banning from the food industry and lifelong banning on enterprises and individuals who have violated the relevant provisions of the Food Safety Law and have been sentenced to revocation of business licences and administrative detention under serious circumstances; promoting the construction of an integrity system in the food industry, establishing a unified integrity file of food production and operation enterprises, and establishing a sound food safety list of bad faith. Regulatory mechanisms are in place to implement "zero tolerance" for serious violations of food safety.

The second is to increase supervision and sampling. For example, it has strengthened the environmental protection and management of food production areas, continuously improved and enhanced the standards for the use of various types of agricultural (veterinary) drugs and feed additives, strictly prohibited the circulation of shoddy and prohibited drugs to the market, and guided farmers and farms to standardise the use of various types of agricultural (veterinary) drugs to prevent and eliminate excessive residues of agricultural (veterinary) drugs.

Thirdly, great importance should be attached to the safety supervision of online food. Strengthen the supervision of the third-party platform, the establishment of the platform and the host of the credit rating system, for live platforms, e-commerce platforms and other negligence in the supervision of food safety accidents caused by the platform should bear joint and several liability, strictly prohibit the fabrication of stories, make-believe, and other false propaganda behaviours, the platform should be stored in the resident merchant's archives, transaction data, the complete supply chain information of the food sold, so that the source of food products can be traced, the direction of the food products can be traced. As well as improve the consumer rights protection network, broaden the reporting channels, set up consumer complaints and reporting links in the APP home page or live page in a prominent position, guide the third-party network platform to establish a consumer rights protection system and measures that can provide rapid feedback, and set up an offline entity complaint service site. At the same time advocate the Internet food universal supervision, play the role of media supervision, help to help consumers with social forces to protect their legitimate rights and interests.