Research On Legal Issues Of Food Safety In International Trade

Food safety issues have been a topic for a long time. With the in‐depth development of economic globalization, it has become a very important part of international food trade and gradually developed into a global problem. Imported food on the one hand meets the needs of all consumers for food abundance, and it also has all countries face food safety issues as well as issues related to trade barriers. Increasingly stringent food safety legislation and related inspection and quarantine measures of States protect the lives and health of its territory consumers, animals and plants, but meanwhile they also hinder the development process of the liberalization of international trade. The World Trade Organization (WTO), which has "promote trade liberalization" as its aim and objective, in order to find a balance between trade liberalization and the proper interests of all countries, developed two very significant agreements on food safety issues:" Technical Barriers To Trade Agreement" and "Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures Agreement" after continuous consultations and negotiations. Although these two agreements are not specific rules for food safety, and there are many shortcomings, but they have certain binding on members developing technical regulations and taking measures related to food safety, they also become the important basis for the Dispute Settlement Body in dispute settlement mechanism to make its ruling.As a trading power, the proportion of China’s food import and export trade in China’s total trade is rising continuously, showing a double growth trend, however, our legislations in food safety issues are in backward status: The existing laws and regulations are not perfect, the level of national food safety standards is low, having a large gap with international standards, and even there are many blanks in the law and national standards. Therefore, the author raise some improvement recommendations on the problems of our current food safety issues based on the study of food safety rules under the WTO framework, as well as the analysis of typical cases in the international food trade disputes. This study mainly consists of three parts. The main contents are as follows:The first part puts forward the questions of law on food safety in international trade. Food safety is closely related to international trade, promoting each other on the one hand, on the other hand also limiting each other, and the main difference between them is on the values they aim to achieve. This difference leads to the existence of following questions of law on food safety in international trade: First, food safety measures in international trade have gradually evolved into the tendency of trade barriers. Second, the WTO norms on food safety issues in the current framework have many shortcomings, which constraints its role in guiding behaviors of the member countries.The second part focuses on the details of the WTO legal regulations on the import and export food safety. This section describes the contents of the WTO agreements related to food safety, and pointed out that the WTO regulates the issues of food safety mainly through the "Technical Barriers to Trade Agreement"(hereinafter “TBT Agreement”) and "Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures Agreement"(hereinafter “SPS Agreement”). Therefore, the author make in‐depth analysis, combined with typical cases, on the food safety regulations in "Technical barriers to Trade Agreement" and "Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures Agreement".The content of the third part is some recommendations to improve China’s food safety laws and rules. This part is another key point of this thesis. The end‐result of any research lies on improvement and perfection of related issues of one’s own country, so this part cards the status quo of China’s food safety laws and regulations, makes comparison between the relevant food safety regulation and rules of WTO and the ones of China, and thus make a conclusion of current existing problems in China. I propose that China should correctly follow the relevant WTO rules, improve food safety standards system and establish a reasonable risk assessment system.