Safe food, safe kids: South Korea eyes legislation-led improvements in rural Children’s Diet Safety Index
The South Korean Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS) conducts a survey on its national Children’s Diet Safety Index every three years, which covers the areas of food safety, nutrition and awareness/practice concerning the food products targeted at children.
As a whole, MFDS Minister Oh Yoo-Kyung announced an increase of 2.1 points in the 2023 Children’s Diet Safety Index, from 70.3 points in 2020 to 72.4 points in 2023.
“The survey for this index is conducted nationwide in 228 local governments to objectively evaluate the safety and nutritional levels of foods going into our children’s diets,” she said via a formal statement.
“The findings of the latest survey showed an increase in scores across the areas of food safety (from 33.5 points to 34.6 points) and nutrition (22.9 points to 24.1 points), but a decrease in awareness/practice (from 13.9 points to 13.7 points.
“This has shown that the hygiene and nutrition management support via our Children’s Meal Management Support Centre which was mandated by regulations as well as the increase in local governments including high quality food ingredients in school meals has been effective – but there has also been increase consumption amongst schoolchildren of foods such as sugary drinks and sweet breads.
“We also found that the index scores decline according to the type of location, from large cities (increased 2.1 points to 73.1) to medium-sized cities (increased 2.3 points to 72.9) to rural areas (increased 1.3 points to 71.3).”
Moving forward, the ministry plans to double down its efforts on improving this score for rural areas.
“That said, we have also identified an area of concern with the rural areas, as the safety index score here is a significant 1.8 points lower than that of large cities,” said the ministry.
“We plan to establish policies that take regional characteristics into account, and actively promote them moving forward to increase the safety index of children's diets in these areas.
“MFDS will also provide encouragement by selecting the top and second-placed local governments by regional performance, and awarding them accordingly.
“The plan is to strengthen the management system for vulnerable areas with these policies that can reduce regional differences, so we can improve the nutritional and safety level for children nationwide.”
Top performers
The sole large city top performer in the country was Gwangju city’s Seo-gu district with a score above 80 at 80.2 points; followed by 22 other local governments across Seoul, Busan, Daegu, Incheon, Gwangju, Daejeon and Ulsan cities that scored between 75 to 80 points, and all others scored below 75 points.
This was from a total of 69 autonomous districts across all the large metropolitan cities.
A similar picture emerged for the medium-sized cities where amongst 77 districts only Gyeonggi city’s Gwacheon-si district scored 80 points, but there were no local governments scoring above 80 amongst all 82 districts in the rural and fishing villages.
