China’s leaders are planning to reorganize the way food and drug safety is regulated in the country in an attempt to improve the process and reduce overlapping enforcement responsibilities in related agencies. The move reflects an attempt by the government to deal with safety scandals that have rocked the nation, sickening thousands of Chinese and creating global concerns over the safety of the country’s food and drug exports.

Discussions taking place at the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress, held every year in March, suggest that the government’s reorganization plan will integrate the 13 agencies currently charged with food safety into the State Food and Drug Administration, SFDA, to create a single safety agency to oversee and enforce food safety regulations in the country, according to a source familiar with the plan that was cited by the South China Morning Post. The Post said the new agency would be modeled on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The revamped SFDA will be tasked with regulating food production, while the Ministry of Agriculture will oversee primary production of food stuffs and the Ministry of Health will be in charge of establishing food safety standards and risk evaluation, according the Post. The SFDA will also become a ministerial level organization.

When it was first formed in 2003, the plan was that the SFDA, currently responsible for regulating drugs, medical devices, health food and cosmetics, would have more power. But problems with corruption surfaced in 2008 when milk tainted with melamine killed six children and sickened more than 300,000 children with kidney disease. The head of the SFDA was convicted and executed for taking bribes and the agency was placed under the supervision of the Ministry of Health.

But the food safety issue didn’t go away with his execution as one agency would blame another when there was a problem and refuse to take responsibility; and the jurisdiction of each agency was very unclear. The new plan is meant to solve some of those problems. According to the Post’s source, President Hu Jintao backed “reforming and improving the food and drug safety supervision mechanism” in the 18th Party Congress Report in November 2012, which gave the green light to move ahead with reforms.

The Post ran a poll along with its initial story on the new agency on March 4. It asked readers: “Can China improve its food and product safety by building a single “super ministry?” While very unscientific, 85 percent of readers who took the poll answered “no.”