This paper addresses the three issues to be examined as follows: First, a theoretical background of the ongoing reforms of food safety administration and an empirical assessment on their consequences. Second, a commitment and a contribution of the agricultural economics to policy debates and to the actual restructuring of institutional framework. Third, international elements related to current food safety policies.
The food safety problem is recognized as a market failure because of incomplete information, under which consumers cannot perfectly observe some hazards of food-borne disease. Therefore no matter how perfect safety regulations are technically established, we cannot assure a high level of food safety without the additional application of legal and economical support.
The "From-Farm-to-Table" approach is definitely a key concept of contemporary food safety policies, which agricultural economics has developed as the analytical and practical approach for dealing with relevant issues. Planning the food safety system would need in-depth considerations for the socioeconomic circumstances. Although until now an ad hoc measure of each hazard has been applied for safety control, food hygiene engineering as the scientific basis, cost benefit analysis, information incompleteness, and risk analysis should be hereafter considered when optimal designs are drawn up for effective risk prevention.
The policy reform of the European Union was examined as a case study. The EU challenges are as follows: First, the risk analysis system was adopted as the core of the policy framework. Second, the previous legislations were coherently realigned and a new general principle of food laws was established. Third, the EU's transnational harmonization for regulation and rules related to food safety, hygiene, and labeling were further advanced among EU member countries. And an emergency code and a competent organization were both established to cope with expected and/or unknown food safety crises.

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Although the United States and Canada will be dairy importers in a perfectly competitive free market, they are now exporters by imposing limited tariff-rate quotas and very high over-quota tariffs and by using two-tier price support policies. Some government officials and researchers in both countries expect that their heavy protective measures for dairy sectors will be maintained because most Western countries, except for New Zealand and Australia, are in the same situation.
Therefore, seeking the common reasons for protection between dairy sectors in Western countries and the rice sectors in Japan will be helpful to the protection of Japanese agriculture in WTO negotiations. Furthermore, we should examine why U.S. and Canadian dairy price support policies are almost free from AMS counts in WTO regulations. The two-tier pricing systems are consumer-financed export subsidies that are free from current WTO rules. A new definition of the ESE (Export Subsidy Equivalent) is proposed to regulate the hidden export subsidies.

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In recent years the role of institutions in economic development has been paid attention to and emphasized more and more, and theoretical and empirical economic studies in this area are both being steadily promoted and/ or accumulated for the developing countries. This article, which focuses on the roles of government, market, and rural communities in agricultural and rural development in particular, tries first to critically review the worldwide trend of research and studies up to the present. Second, it attempts to rethink it from the fieldwork-based research experiences of the author himself in Bangladesh, India, and Myanmar during the last decade or so.
The main questions are where the market fails and how and to what extent government or rural communities can make up for these failures in the context of the actual institutional setups surrounding developing countries. As an example, the issues of the groundwater market in Bangladesh and in West Bengal, India, were raised, and it was discussed that the market failure arising from a lack of coordination among farmers cannot be solved by the government and/ or rural communities, given their present capacities and their nature. As another example, the question of rural finance was raised, where it is well known that market failures prevail because of the problems of information asymmetry and enforcement. In this context, microfinancing became rapidly popular, especially after the 'success' of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. However, the author argued that microfinance is the second best solution where rural communities and local government institutions lack enough capacity to solve the abovementioned problems in financial transactions; therefore microfinancial institutions must bear a huge amount of transaction costs, which often endanger its sustainability.
The author suggests that individual economic behavior could be totally different under various institutional setups; thus agricultural economists should pay more attention to the latter than to the former.

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