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A chicken pho restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City.

The responsibility of managing food safety should be divided among three concerned ministries, an official told a Hanoi conference on Monday.

Do Gia Phan from the Vietnam Association for Product Quality and Consumer Protection said the ministries had not done a good job when it came to food safety.

“Sometimes none of the ministries do anything in serious situations while there’re also cases in which all three have been involved in the same job with none taking the main responsibility.”

Officials at the conference said farmers in Vietnam are not well aware of food safety and hygiene standards while concerned agencies are poorly staffed and underequipped. Only 11 percent of street food is monitored at all by such agencies.

Nguyen Dang Vang, vice chairman of the National Assembly Committee of Science, Technology and Environment, said the agriculture ministry only employs three food safety and hygiene inspectors while the Ministry of Health has only nine, meaning that each city or province only has half an officer checking food quality.

Vang said the 337 central government documents and 900 by local documents related to food safety were doing little to control the “out-of-control” food management system.

Around 7 percent of vegetables on sale contain more harmful chemicals than permitted while 38 percent of meat and seafood products fail to meet safety requirements, he told Thanh Nien on the sidelines of the conference.

The addition of urea, borax and other toxic preservatives to foods has become “complicated,” Vang said. “That makes consumers anxious and hesitant every time they buy foods.”

Ngo Tien Hien, former head of the Food Industry Institute, said at the conference that 2,138 food poisoning cases had killed 566 people in Vietnam over the last decade.

Le Doan Dien, chairman of Vietnam Food Science and Technology Association, also cited the World Health Organization figures that said food poisoning causes a loss of more than US$200 million in Vietnam every year.

Yet Vang said those figures still barely scratched the surface of the problem as the toxins in foods pile up in the body, shortening life-spans and causing dangerous diseases such as cancer.

Reported by Quang Duan