Research On The Establishment And Responsibilities Of China's Food Safety Regulatory Agencies

In recent years, many very serious incidents concerning food safety occurred successively in China, and the Government failed in effectively responding to and addressing such food security crisis, which cause the confidence crisis regarding the government regulation. In 2009 "Food Safety Law" was established to seek the appropriate solutions to the problems in food safety regulation at this age. And in 2010, National People's Congress and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference also put the issue of food safety regulation on a top agenda.Therefore, how to effectively improve China's food safety regulation system has become a very important topic to research.The first part of this paper gives an overview of the situation of China's food safety regulation. The first subsection introduces the unique nature of China's food industry, and sums up some serious food safety incidents in recent years. Then on the background of the newly published "Food Safety Law", I will give a longitudinal analysis of the history of China's food safety regulation system and describe the establishment and development of China's multi-department regulation system through which I will analyze the defects of this multi-department regulation system.In the second part, the theory of government regulation will be given to affirm the necessity that government should carry out effective regulation on food safety and I will describes the functions and executive nature of social regulatory agencies. First, I will analyze both the negative externalities generated by economic activities, which cause the harm to society, and the information asymmetries in market between the two parties, which leads to a party with less information at a disadvantage position. Therefore, the government's social regulatory agencies must assume the responsibility of suppression on the negative externalities and mitigation of asymmetries of information to ensure social fairness and justice and the people's physical health. Then with the public goods theory demonstrates that only the government can ensure the effective supply of public goods to protect public interest. Then under the direction of social regulation theory, I will analyze the establishment and the functions of food safety regulatory agencies to provide some guidance for the improvement of China's food safety regulatory agencies.The method of the third part is comparative analysis. Through the comparative analysis among the system of food safety regulatory agencies in the United States, Canada, Britain and Japan, I will summarize the good experience as enlightenment to China.Finally, on the basis of the above analysis, I will use the path-dependence theory to analysis of the institutional obstacles of China's food safety regulatory agencies'reform, and search the proper reform approach for China. As a conclusion, it is arbitrary to make a fundamental change, and we had better continue to this multi-department regulation system but with gradual development to unity and relative independence. Then under this guiding ideology I will give some comments and suggestions to strengthen food safety regulation.