China Rolls Out Cross-Ministerial Policies to Upgrade Domestic Marine Health Food and Biomedical Sectors

Per Xinhua News Agency, eight central administrative authorities including the State Administration for Market Regulation, National Medical Products Administration and Ministry of Natural Resources have jointly unveiled a guiding document targeted at boosting high-quality development of marine pharmaceuticals and functional marine products across China recently. The official circular singles out three core development tracks covering marine health food, marine pharmaceutical preparations and marine biomaterials, marking targeted policy backing for the comprehensive upgrading of the country’s whole marine industrial chain.

Marine health food constitutes a core subsection within China’s broader marine economy framework, grouped into three mainstream product categories by functional composition. These include polyunsaturated fatty acid items such as fish oil and krill oil, polysaccharide derivatives ranging from chitosan to sea cucumber polysaccharides, alongside protein and bioactive peptide goods including fish collagen peptide and oyster peptide. Products falling under these classifications serve practical public demands for antioxidant support, immune system modulation and cognitive health maintenance across domestic consumer markets.

Under clauses outlined in the newly released guideline, the State Administration for Market Regulation will stick to rigorous filing and registration oversight standards to secure consistent product safety for all registered marine health supplements. While tightening baseline quality supervision, the regulator prioritises market-driven functional directions including anti-oxidation, memory improvement and physical fatigue relief. Financial and institutional support will be extended to domestic research institutes and industrial manufacturers to adopt advanced modern biotechnology, accelerating research and commercial rollout of novel raw ingredients and innovative functional formulas for marine health food, with dedicated resource tilted toward newly developed functional supplement varieties to cater to diversified domestic health consumption needs.

China boasts abundant inshore marine biological reserves, putting its raw material output capacity for seaweed, crustacean shells and deep-sea biological resources among the world’s top tier. Domestic annual production of alginate hits approximately 50,000 tonnes, accounting for 80 per cent of global total output, while yearly chitin and chitosan production stands at 35,000 tonnes to occupy over 80 per cent of worldwide supply volume. Progressive advances in offshore and deep-sea resource exploitation technologies have also enabled scaled industrial application of deep-sea microbial materials, establishing steady, cost-effective and sustainable raw material supply channels and a fully domestically controlled industrial loop spanning natural resource exploitation, raw material refinement and finished product manufacturing.

Endowed with self-sufficient raw material reserves and cumulative research advantages, domestic suppliers keep enriching product portfolios and lifting overall quality standards for locally produced marine health food. Relevant authorities push forward the construction of a national catalogue of permitted raw materials for health food registration, with ten functional ingredients such as fish oil and spirulina already incorporated into the official filing list. The updated catalogue cuts down compliance expenditures for manufacturers and shortens administrative cycles for new product market access, injecting tangible growth momentum into the whole marine supplement sector.

A dual-review operational framework featuring cross-department technical coordination and joint expert assessment has been set up by the State Administration for Market Regulation to streamline approval procedures for untested raw materials and innovative health functions of marine supplements. Administrative bodies also encourage qualified third-party technical service organisations to participate in core research targeting quality control and safety breakthroughs within the marine health food industry, steering the sector away from blind output expansion toward development anchored by product quality and technological superiority

Per official data cited by China Economic Net, the national marine pharmaceutical and functional product industry achieved total added value of 99.6 billion yuan throughout 2025, with steady growth recorded over the past several years on the back of continuous policy and technological input. Implementation of the latest cross-department guideline will further unlock the inherent potential of China’s marine biological resources to drive steady industrial expansion in the coming years.