International comparison of the governance for risk on food safety - Issues and lessons -

Abstract

Food safety is an increasingly important public health issue. Governments all over the world are intensifying their efforts to prevent food-borne adverse effect to human health and to improve food safety. These efforts are in response to an increasing number of food safety problems and rising consumer concerns all over the world. The basic concept regarding the governance for food-borne risk is proposed by Codex Alimentarius Commission (abbreviated as Codex). Each government in the global community has the responsibility to construct its own food safety regulatory system on the basis of risk governance procedure for the consumer health protection proposed by Codex. In this report, we studied the international comparison about the functional and institutional situation of food safety regulatory measures among some countries in Europe and other regions. Furthermore, in order to evaluate these existing systems and measures of the governance for risk from the viewpoints of adequacy, effectiveness and confidence, we tried to design the comprehensive framework of the evaluation which has the accurate standards and indexes.