The primary focus of the workshop was on food-safety economics for animal products.

Food safety has become a major concern for consumers in the developed world and Europe in particular. This has been highlighted by the recent spate of food scares ranging from the BSE (mad cow) crisis to Chinese melamine contamination of baby formula. To ensure food safety throughout Europe, stringent food safety standards have been put in place ‘from farm to fork’. At the same time, poor African countries in the COMESA rely on their food exports to the European market to achieve their development goals yet have difficulty meeting the EU food safety standards. This book examines the impact of EU food safety standards on food imports from COMESA countries. It also critically examines both EU and COMESA food safety standards in light of the WTO SPS Agreement and the jurisprudence of the WTO panels and Appellate Body. The book makes ground-breaking proposals on how the standards divide between the EU and the COMESA can be bridged and discusses the impact of EU food safety standards on food imports from poor African countries.

This work debates and investigates the the cross-compliance system: where farmers comply with certain standards relating to the environment, food safety and animal and plant health. It discusses cross-compliance in the context of existing standards, on-farm costs and the competitiveness of farm businesses. Analyzing the economics of regulation both within the internal market of the EU and the broader world market by examining a broad range of agricultural products, this resource will be of value to agriculture and resource economists, policy makers, researchers and students in environmental and agricultural policy and modelling.

One of the great myths of contemporary American culture is that the United States’ food supply is the safest in the world because the government works to guarantee food safety and enforce certain standards on food producers, processors, and distributors. In reality U.S. food safety administration and oversight have remained essentially the same for more than a century, with the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 continuing to frame national policy despite dramatic changes in production, processing, and distribution throughout the twentieth century. In Food We Trust is the first comprehensive examination of the history of food safety policy in the United States, analyzing critical moments in food safety history from Upton Sinclair’s publication of The Jungle to Congress’s passage of the 2010 Food Safety Modernization Act. With five case studies of significant food safety crises ranging from the 1959 chemical contamination of cranberries to the 2009 outbreak of salmonella in peanut butter, In Food We Trust contextualizes a changing food regulatory regime and explains how federal agencies are fundamentally limited in their power to safeguard the food supply.

Risks are increasingly regulated by international standards, and scientists play a key role in standardisation. This fascinating book exposes the action of 'invisible colleges' of scientists - loose groups of prominent scientific experts who combine practical experience of risk and control with advisory responsibility - in the formulation of international standards. Drawing upon the domains of medicines, 'novel foods' and food hygiene, David Demortain investigates new regulatory concepts emerging from invisible colleges, highlighting how they shape consensus and pave the way for international.

Food safety is receiving more attention worldwide with the rising incidence of foodborne disease, concern over new potential hazards, and growth in agricultural trade. Investments to improve food safety in developing countries can reduce the burden of disease and remove the barriers to fresh food product exports, providing another source of income for the rural sector. International disputes over sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures influence the ability of developing countries to compete in export markets. These countries need to evaluate their interest in the SPS agreement under the World Trade Organisation (WTO); participate more fully in international agencies responsible for harmonisation; develop the capacity to assess equivalence for process standards, which are increasingly used for fresh food products; and resist the imposition of inappropriate standards.

When faced with tackling food-borne illness, regulators have a number of competing goals. They must investigate in order to discover the source of the illness. Once the source is identified they must take action to prevent further cases of illness occurring. Finally, once the illness is under control, they may wish to take enforcement action against those responsible. Regulating Food-Borne Illness uses interviews and documentary analysis to examine the actions of regulators and considers how they balance these three tasks. Central to the regulators' role is the collection of information. Without information about the source, control or enforcement action cannot be taken. Investigation must therefore take place to produce the necessary information. Utilising theoretical frameworks drawn from regulation and biosecurity, Regulating Food-Borne Illness shows that control is prioritised, and that investigatory steps are chosen in order to ensure that the information necessary for control, rather than enforcement, is collected. This has the effect of reducing the possibility that enforcement action can be taken. The difficulty of evidence gathering and case-building in food-borne illness cases is exposed, and the author considers the methods aimed at reducing the difficulty of bringing successful enforcement action.

In recent years, China has taken a number of effective measures to strengthen the supervision of food quality and safety, but food safety incidents still occur sometimes. The recurrence and intractability of such incidents suggest that, in addition to the imperfect supervision system, the greatest obstacle to China's food quality safety management is that China's “farm to fork” food supply chain has too many stages, the members on the supply chain have not form a stable strategic and cooperative relation, and on the other hand, during the transitional period, some practitioners lack social responsibility. Therefore, China's food quality safety management and the establishment of food quality and safety traceability system should follow the development trend of international food quality and safety supervision, and should combine with the establishment of China's agricultural industrialization and standardization, integrate China's existing but isolated effective measures, such as the establishment of bases for the implementation of the system of claiming certificates or invoices, for the performance of Management Regulations for Pig Slaughtering and Quarantine Inspection in Designated Places, and for the conduct of World Expo, as well as the establishment of market access system, take into consideration the demand, the dynamic mechanism, and the performance of important measures of food supply chain members for food quality and safety control, as well as the difficulties and the deep-seated reasons in the implementation process of such measures.To this end, this book chooses important agricultural products of vegetables, pork and aquatic products as the subjects investigated. From an “integrated” vertical perspective of the supply chain and according to the degree of industrialization of different products, focusing on the key links of quality and safety control of vegetables, pork and aquatic products, this book carries out empirical analysis of the construction of food quality and safety control system, such as HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point) quality control system and food quality and safety traceability system, deeply analyzes and straightens out the dynamic mechanism and the performance of different business entities implementing the food quality and safety management system, as well as the bottleneck and deep-seated causes of promoting advanced experience of pilot areas and enterprises in China, and put forward ideas and suggestions of establishing long-term effective food quality and safety management system with regard to vegetables, pork, and aquatic products, which can provide scientific basis for the government to design food quality and safety management policies.