Vietnam QCVN 8-2:2011/BYT - heavy-metal limits in food

Scope

QCVN 8-2:2011/BYT applies to importers, producers, and sellers of food products at risk of heavy-metal contamination, and to relevant organizations and individuals.

Exact limit and units

The technical-requirements tables set maximum limits in mg/kg or mg/l for arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury, methylmercury, and tin. The structured register converts each mg/kg or mg/l value to ug/kg-equivalent by multiplying by 1000 and preserves the food category in each row.

How tested

The regulation lists test-method references including Vietnamese standards and AOAC methods for arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury, methylmercury, and tin. It allows other test methods with equivalent accuracy.

Enforcement posture

The management section requires relevant entities to ensure that foods do not exceed the heavy-metal limits and supports recall/destruction or other treatment where contamination exceeds allowable limits.

History of changes

QCVN 8-2:2011/BYT was issued with Circular No. 02/2011/TT-BYT. The local English PDF is treated as a translation companion to the Vietnamese text, which is gap-logged as duplicate-language coverage for this ingest.

How it compares

Vietnam uses a broad commodity schedule similar to Codex-style food contaminant tables. Arsenic is not identified as inorganic in the maximum-limit table, so HMI records those rows as total arsenic; methylmercury receives separate fish rows.

Sources

• QCVN 8-2:2011/BYT National technical regulation on the safety limits of heavy metal contamination in food (English)

Update history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page, classified major (evidence or structure moved), correction (a published value or statement was wrong and has been fixed), or minor (narrative rewritten without changing the underlying evidence). Each description is derived from what the edit did to this page; the linked commit is the authoritative record, routine regeneration passes are excluded, and the full version history lives in git. When DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.