Responsibility for food law used to lie with the Federal Ministry of Health. In 2001, it was transferred to the Federal Ministry of Consumer Protection, Food and Agriculture, now the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture. One of the focal points of its work is co-operation with the European Union as well as with the federal states in the performance of legislative, control, monitoring and information tasks. As part of consumer information and to improve the general flow of information, various internet portals with different objectives, such as
www.Lebensmittelklarheit.de or
www.lebensmittelwarnung.de, have since been created by the federal government, in particular by the
Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety BVL and the federal states. Due to the federal structure in Germany, the federal states are responsible for carrying out official food monitoring and testing. The advantages of these structures, such as the consideration of typical state conditions, must continue to be utilised. However, the disadvantages, which can also result from longer information paths, must be reduced and lead to even more effective food monitoring in the interests of all. The federal government and the federal states are therefore still called upon to optimise the organisation and to guarantee the necessary adequate financial and personnel resources in the future.
The "Food Monitoring" working group of the Food Chemistry Society, a specialist group within the GDCh, last updated the compilation of the legal bases and organisational forms of food monitoring in the Federal Republic of Germany in 2009 and 2013. Since then, the trend towards bundling tasks by merging testing facilities, which began earlier, has continued. The states of Berlin and Brandenburg merged their testing facilities to form the Berlin-Brandenburg State Laboratory - the LLBB, Institute for Food, Drugs and Epizootics as an institution under public law. This was the first cross-state testing facility in the Federal Republic of Germany. In North Rhine-Westphalia, five institutions under public law have now been established, mainly from state veterinary investigation offices and municipal or district chemical and food investigation offices. In addition, the Düsseldorf and Mettmann municipal inspection offices continue to cooperate.
According to
Table 1, official food monitoring and testing in all federal states with the exception of Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt is the responsibility of a single ministry, usually the Ministry of Agriculture or the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs, and in Berlin the Senate Department for Justice and Consumer Protection. They each cover a wide variety of specialised areas in different combinations. In Saxony-Anhalt, the tasks were assigned to two ministries and in Rhineland-Palatinate to four different ministries. The responsibilities of the individual ministries are based on the departmental responsibilities, which can also change during the respective current election periods due to political decisions. On-site food monitoring in the Bundeswehr is carried out by medical officers, pharmacists licensed as food chemists and veterinarians from four monitoring centres for public-law tasks. The laboratory tests are carried out in the two central institutes of the Bundeswehr Medical Service in Kiel and Munich. The coordination of food monitoring and testing is the responsibility of the relevant specialised department at the Bundeswehr Medical Service Command in Koblenz. The highest supervisory authority and thus also the contact point for the highest federal and state health authorities is located in the Armed Forces Command Department in the BMVg. The reorganisation of the Bundeswehr, which is associated with a reduction in troop numbers, also affects the number and locations of the examination facilities. The necessary organisational changes have already been initiated or implemented.
From
Table 2 it can be seen that the creation of state offices, state laboratories and state operations has now been further
advanced. The objective is the even more comprehensive integration of investigation and work tasks, which in many cases go far beyond the tasks of food testing and monitoring, against the background of increasing legal requirements and the avoidance of further cost increases for the federal states. The merging of testing facilities and the further bundling of tasks will also make it necessary to expand or set up new cross-state co-operations on certain testing priorities, such as the North German co-operation NoKo. The German Food and Feed Code (LFGB) of 1 September 2005 (BGBl. I p. 2618), which replaced the former Act on the Marketing of Foodstuffs, Tobacco Products, Cosmetics and Other Commodities (LMBG), regulates the marketing of foodstuffs, commodities, cosmetics and animal feed. Tobacco products were separated out and were initially governed by the Provisional Tobacco Act, which emerged from the previous LMBG, and since May 2016 by a new Tobacco Products Act, which serves in particular to implement new legislation at EU level. The legal provisions in the federal states must be further adapted to the changed legal situation and also organisational changes, so that
Table 3 must also be updated in the future.
In
Table 4, all regulations relating to the professional title of "food chemists" or the training and examination of state-certified food chemists have been summarised. With the exception of Bremen, all federal states have training and examination regulations for food chemists. In the German Armed Forces, the training of food chemists is carried out in cooperation with the federal states on the basis of the respective training and examination regulations and guidelines of the German Armed Forces.
Literature
1.Brockmann, A. Lebensmittelchemie 63, 90 - 97 (2009)
2.Brockmann, A., Lohs, P. Lebensmittelchemie 60, 105 - 136 (2006)
3.Lohs, P., Brockmann, A. Lebensmittelchemie 56, 68 - 74 (2002)
Status: 01 January 2016
Address of the authorsAnneliese Brockmann
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