The government is drafting a new food safety law in an effort to better protect consumers, a Health Ministry spokesman Friday.
Ly Sovan, director of the Health Ministry’s communicable disease control department, said that officials from several government ministries were working on draft legislation.
“There are legal documents, principles and policies that cover food safety already but we don’t have a law that is sufficiently strong,” Mr. Sovan said.
“That’s why we need to compile and develop these documents to have a law that is more powerful while our country is being developed,” he said, adding that the work was still in its “technical” stages.
Ung Davy, whose Leang Leng Enterprise makes a range of sauces, said she was worried that tougher rules could be introduced too quickly for food producers.
“I don’t support the government adopting the draft law without much more training, education and awareness-raising in advance,” she said. “[Producers] don’t have enough knowledge about food safety, like hygiene and standards, and they still practice their traditional and habitual ways of producing food, which is not easy to change.”
