Executive Council announces regulations on food coloring

The Executive Council has concluded its analysis of food safety regulations. This time, rules concerning the use of food color additives were elaborated on, the council’s spokesperson Leong Heng Teng announced in a press conference yesterday.

The main reason why the government elaborated on the rules is related to the fact that “in recent years, food safety incidents have occurred in different places which were caused by the addition of industrial dyes, and had not been submitted to a safety assessment.”

The draft proposes a criterion for food color additives to be allowed in food. It prohibits using food additives in unprocessed or raw meat, aquatic products, vegetables and food products for infants.

In total, 45 food color additives are allowed for usage, including 17 tar dyes and 28 natural dyes.

According to Ung Sau Hong, member of the Administrative Committee of the Civic and Municipal Affairs Bureau (IACM), “no incidents were registered where industrial food coloring was added to food. However, we did find cases of food containing artificial coloring, although the number was small.” Ung then added that the government “has conducted an investigation before it drafted this regulation, and all sampled food were qualified and met the food safety criteria.”

This is the eighth regulation regarding the food safety topic, and the government is still working on other food safety aspects.

“Later, we have the sweeteners, preservatives, pesticide residues, heavy metals, and other related legal regulations to be introduced one after another,” announced Ung.

This regulation will come into effect the day after its publication.

During the same press conference, an administrative regulation draft regarding the Macau SAR Identification Department’s (DSI) operation and function was also revealed.

The draft suggested DSI add one more deputy director, one more department and eight more divisions.

According to the draft, DSI’s functions should also expand to handling nationality applications and approvals for applications of residence certification, as well as verification for Macau residents’ applications for inviting their mainland’s relatives to reunite with them in Macau, the reunification of a couple, and the reunification between Macau residents and their biological children in mainland China or children adopted from mainland China.

A new department responsible for general subjects, and a division for registration of associations or the registration of legal personalities has also been suggested for establishment.

The draft also proposed to increase the number of staff in the establishment from 131 to 186 workers.

“We don’t have any recruitment plan [for DSI], this is just increasing the number of staff establishment, and the number of the staff is not increased,” Executive Council spokesperson Leong Heng Teng pointed out.