Food Safety: A Developing Country Perspective
Food Safety: A Developing Country Perspective

Summary/Abstract: Developing countries, trying to achieve an acceptable level of food safety at the least possible cost (efficiencyobjective) and facilitation of market access to the large and lucrative developed country food markets (market accessobjective), could follow the multilateral, regional, unilateral or the independent approach. The paper studying the prosand cons of these approaches aims to determine the most appropriate food safety reform package. It shows that thebest approach is the unilateral. Under this approach the achievement of efficiency objective requires the adoptionand implementation of the multilateral approach. The achievement of market access objective requires the adoptionand implementation of the regulatory regime of the developed country whose markets the developing country isintending to penetrate. Instead, the paper proposes that the developing country adopts and implements the developedcountries‘ regulatory regime only in agricultural sub-sectors with highest comparative advantage scores, and that inall other agricultural sub-sectors the country should adopt and implement the regulatory regime as developed bymultilateral approach. Since the tasks associated with designing and implementing the food safety policy reform arechallenging, the paper advocates that this task should be left to a new institution, the ‘Food Safety Council‘, whichneeds to be formed as an autonomous public institution with sufficient financial and technical resources.

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