Lack Of Standards: The Industrial Orientation Of The World'S Largest Country Of Plant Extraction Raw Materials Remains To Be Solved

"The lack of standards leads to the lag of standards for food raw materials. The industry of plant extracts should strengthen basic research, establish rules for food raw materials and formulate industry standards for classification and classification." Recently, at the expert review and consultation meeting of "white paper on China's plant extract industry" and "Research Report on China's plant extract industry" held by the economic consulting center of the National Information Center, Zeng Jianguo, a professor of Hunan Agricultural University, who presided over the preparation, suggested that the national, industrial and group standard systems for plant extracts should be established as soon as possible.

It is understood that the export volume of China's plant extraction industry has rapidly increased from only US $50 million in 1997 to more than US $2.7 billion in 2019, and its share in the global market has increased from less than 3% in 1997 to 20% in 2019. The compound growth rate of global plant extract market is more than 10%, while the compound annual growth rate of extract products in China is more than 15%. At present, there are more than 2000 enterprises engaged in the import and export of plant extracts, and more than 50 enterprises export more than 10 million US dollars.

At present, China has gradually developed into the world's largest supplier of plant extract raw materials, but the country's overall industrial development strategy has not been clearly defined. Because the status of plant extract industry is not clear and the industry is not mature, it is difficult to attract social technical force and capital. There are many small enterprises, most of them only pay attention to production technology innovation, neglect basic research, product innovation, independent R & D strength is weak, and product homogeneity is serious.

In addition to establishing relevant standards as soon as possible, Zeng Jianguo also stressed that enterprises should strengthen industry self-discipline, establish industrial alliance, comprehensively promote industrial upgrading, share market big data information and technology services, build industrial innovation cooperation and docking platform, promote high-quality development of China's plant extract industry, and comprehensively improve the overall technical level of China's plant extract field.

Vigorous development of plant extract industry

Plant extract is a kind of product that takes plant as raw material, according to the needs of final product use, through extraction and separation process, directional acquisition and concentration of one or more components in plants, generally does not change the structural characteristics of the original components of plants. It can be directly dried into powder, or supplemented with excipients to make powder or granule with good fluidity and moisture resistance, or liquid or paste products.

Plant extracts are important raw materials for food and medicated diet, health food, plant derived daily chemical products, plant derived cosmetics, breeding inputs (forage plant extracts, plant extracts, feed additives, Chinese veterinary drugs), botanical pesticides, botanical drugs, etc.; the demand for natural source materials such as plant essential oil, spices, sweeteners, colorants is becoming stronger and stronger.

With the introduction of China's and the world's "feed withdrawal" and "breeding limited resistance" policies, "feed antibiotics" will turn to natural anti drug products; TCM formula granules, innovative traditional Chinese medicine drugs, etc. will bring huge development space for "traditional Chinese medicine extract". With the increasing market demand for plant extracts in China, plant extracts will usher in a new development period as the raw materials of "big health" products.

According to Zeng Jianguo, the application scenarios of plant extracts in China are gradually expanding. As a new growth point, the scale of high-quality enterprises is growing. In the first half of 2020, affected by the new crown pneumonia epidemic, Chenguang biotechnology group, which has a number of plant extract varieties and the world's largest market share, still achieved export earnings of US $82 million, an increase of 53.7% year-on-year.

From the perspective of export market, China's plant extract export markets are concentrated in the United States, Europe and Asia. The United States, Japan, India, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea, Spain, Germany and France are the top ten export markets of plant extracts in China.

The orientation of plant extract industry needs to be clarified

In recent years, the domestic market demand continues to increase, China has gradually developed into the world's largest supplier of plant extract raw materials, the current scale is equivalent to the export, and will exceed the export in the future. However, the lack of standards makes the industry in an awkward situation. The state has not given a clear positioning to the plant extract industry from the overall industrial development strategy.

At present, China has not formulated a list of plant extracts as raw materials of food and health food, and the supervision mode is not clear. Only the Chinese herbal extracts included in the Pharmacopoeia have corresponding standards. It is understood that the Ministry of agriculture and rural areas will study and formulate relevant laws and regulations on feed additives of plant extracts, and put forward the technical requirements of characteristic atlas, and plant extracts will make a substantial breakthrough in the raw materials of breeding inputs.

It is understood that because there is no unified national standard, some are implemented according to food standards, some are implemented according to drug standards, some are implemented according to the technical requirements approved during registration review, and each health food uses different standards and processes for raw material extract during registration review, which results in the production enterprises of extracts to organize production according to multiple processes This seriously affects the production efficiency. At the same time, the frequent replacement of process and system makes the quality of products difficult to control, resulting in a great waste of production resources, and also causes great trouble to the compliance of production enterprises.

Lu Qingguo, deputy to the National People's Congress and chairman of Chenguang biology, also pointed out that plant extract is a small and refined industry with great development space. The plant extract industry is the effective way to solve the problem of comprehensive utilization of resources. The state should consider the plant extract industry as the comprehensive utilization of agricultural products and processing by-products.

It is understood that the relevant departments are also planning to formulate national standards for terms of plant extracts, classification of plant extracts and standardized production of plant extracts. The China Medical Insurance chamber of Commerce has organized the drafting of a series of group standards for plant extracts export products.

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