Upgrading food safety

China's top legislature adopted the country's first food safety law in the first half of 2009, months after milk contaminated with melamine killed six infants and sickened 300,000 others.

Now the country's food safety watchdog is pushing to revise the law, in a move aimed at plugging the legal loopholes and curbing the pervasive malpractices in the food production and sale chain.

The China Food and Drug Administration recently said that it has gathered opinions from experts on revising the Food Safety Law and will strive to draft an amendment by the end of this year to set up the "harshest-ever legal monitoring and management system on food and drug safety".