This paper reviews current state of agri-food business in Asian economies, specifically, East Asian countries. In the post 1997-crisis era, food and agri business sector remained the least affected in most of the countries. Moreover, the sector has seen tremendous growth in recent years in Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia. Korea and Japan, despite being agro based economies largely depends on imported agricultural inputs showed a different picture. Traditional supply chain has evolved into a high tech robust end-to-end distribution system with increasing emphasis on customer satisfaction across Asia. Countries like Thailand, have responded to changing faces of global agri-business by employing modern techniques like RFID traceability system. Rise of supermarkets in Asian countries is mainly driven by increasing middle class and higher incomes with increasing sense of quality and price sensitivity. Effective Supply Chain Management (SCM) is taken as a tool for combating fierce competition, cutting cost and improving economic performance. Mergers and alliances are playing vital role providing huge volumes through supermarkets but have the role of wet markets is reduced? Green initiative, on the other hand, claims improved economic performance and an alternate solution for small to mid size farm owners to stay competitive in front of large conglomerates. A brief introduction of role of food safety standard ISO22000 SCM is also included.

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Food safety systems are being actively implemented in many countries because consumers are becoming seriously concerned on food safety issues. In Korea, the number of stakeholders, such as farmers, distributors and retailers, who join the GAP Program or Traceability System increases rapidly due to the public information and education campaign by the government for the establishment of food safety system from production to consumption stage. Some farmers expect a higher price for their products that are produced under the GAP Program or Traceability System. Some consumers, however, do not recognize the presence of products of GAP and the Traceability System because there is limited distribution of GAP and Traceability System products at discount stores. For this reason, some farmers who have registered in the GAP Program or Traceability System did not implement or postponed their implementation of GAP or Traceability system. Some farmers were not satisfied with the Traceability System because it is not implemented in the wholesale market. For the wide implementation of the GAP Program and Traceability System, farmers should recognize the purposes of its implementation, that is, from having added price to the production of safe food. The Traceability System should also be introduced at the wholesale market as soon as possible.

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Many countries have been experienced various kinds of food safety issues. In order to perform stable supply of safe food, it is necessary to advance simultaneously the risk analysis and the protection of food through the food chain approach from farm to table. Food chain approach tends to hide behind the risk analysis of food. It is an important view, and if it ignores, unnecessary confusion will take place. Food safety is common concern of each food with nutrition, palatability, etc. More than them, reliability is asked strongly now. The distrusts such as addition of poisonous material or mislabeling have been increasing to the whole food chain. Nowadays, it is difficult to also deliver the wisdom to continue eating the food inherited by domestic to the next generation. Our country where a food self-sufficiency ratio is low should take care of food chain approach especially. It is required to value a food chain also for the next generation. It is also required for us to accept the risk of being permissible. We need to act so that it may become the risk of being permissible.

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Serious Food accidents have broken out in succession all over the world. The concept of risk was introduced in the food safety field and the government became to aim at taking measures of health protection based on scientific data related the risks against it. This paper treats international framework, the concept of risk analysis, measures per steps on food chain and regulatory science for food safety.

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The word, "Kanshokufuji" created by the author, means a concept of a sound food system in a sound agro-environment. This is one of key concept for establishment of secure and sustainable food system in the next generation. It is important to recognize the all processes as a food system. The processes start from the growing condition of the agricultural, livestock and marine product, and cover production, processing, and circulation of food. The processes also contain meal, intake and metabolism of food, residue and waste management. Safety and the risk of food are consistencies. It is necessary to research various risks of coiling round food to improve the safety of food by the entire food system. Such a risk lurks in not only food but also resources and the environments such as arable land, the soil, and the water that become basic of the farming activity and agriculture that produces food. Then, the author proposes the creation of new field "risk research in foods, agriculture, resource and environment". In the field, various risks are researched from three aspects, know the risk, lower the risk, protect against the risk, overall in this research world. In the risk reduction, it is indispensable to support the worker's judgment, alert the illegal operations and record the work history. The information and communication technology accomplishes the essential role in this field.

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Soil moisture is important information for agricultural fields in which erosion of upper soil layers depends upon the soil moisture and in which the yield depends on soil water contents during sowing, growing, and harvest periods. Although many studies have estimated moisture in bare soil fields using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging, few models are useful to estimate volumetric soil moisture for wide areas because of requests for detailed roughness data. This study is intended to estimate soil moisture in bare soil fields using ALOS/PALSAR imaging. In the active microwave domain, the measured signal (backscattering coefficient) over bare soil depends on the soil moisture and surface roughness. Reducing surface roughness effects on backscattering coefficients is the main challenge confronting soil moisture estimation using single-frequency, single-polarization SAR data. First, we evaluated the relationships between the backscattering coefficient and RMS (Root Mean Square) height, an index of roughness, which is calculated with elevation data at 1.4-m intervals. Results showed that backscattering coefficients were correlated with RMS height. Consequently, backscattering in conditions with no volumetric soil moisture variation in the study area was simulated. The effect of roughness was reduced by subtracting the backscattering coefficients simulated using our approach from those of all obtained PALSAR images. Furthermore, we developed a linear approach using the regression line between the backscattering coefficient, which reduced the effects of roughness (Δσ ^o ), and measured volumetric soil moisture values. The approach developed in this study estimates soil moisture with 4.4% RMSE for validation data that were not used to produce the model.

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