Study On Food Safety And International Trade

Food safety is the prerequisite for the food consumption. It, along with nutrition security, public health security, energy and resource security and ecological environment security, is the basis for a country. Whether or not to have the safe and high-quality food is one of important signs to measure the level of the well-off family in China, also an important part in the realization of change in the main source of economic growth.In 2009, China's total volume of foreign trade is up to 2207.3 billion dollars and the total export ranks first in the world. According to the statistics from WTO, food trade accounts for around 9% of the world trade and annual trade value is about 400-500 billion dollars. Since the entry into WTO, both the export and import of food have been on the rise. Along with the rapid growth of trade on an international scale, food safety has turned borderless.International supply chains in the food industry have lengthened in recent years and new sources of risk have arisen. With increased consumers'incomes, perceptions about food safety have become sharper and food safety has become an important issue in public policy both domestically and internationally.Food safety can not only affect the export and import trade of a country, but have an impact on world trade. The safety of food is a credence characteristic which gives rise to a particular form of market failure involving either asymmetric information and moral hazard or symmetric imperfect information. An example from a recent experience in the UK was used to illustrate the issue of moral hazard, as well as the possible responses to it. Likewise, international trade, in turn, can have a lot to do with food trade and often provide a channel for the spread of food pollution such as the BSE in 1996, the dioxin in 1999 and the bird flu from 2004 to 2005. All these vicious food incidents, without exception, have exerted a direct or potential hazard on the health of consumers. Contamination of food can occur at each stage of the several stages in the supply chain. As supply chains have been lengthening internationally, it is possible for new sources of risk to be introduced at each stage (i.e., production, processing and distribution) because of differences in process or product standards across exporting countries. In addition, these incidents subject the countries concerned to a huge economic loss in export trade.In the context above, this paper mainly includes four parts based on the factors affecting international trade and competitiveness of China's export.In the first part, international trade pattern after World War II and the present trade pattern are analyzed. Then its future trend is predicted. Also, it analyzes the roles that developed and developing countries are playing in the international trade pattern. From the perspective of politics, economics and technology, it explains the influence of each factor on the present trade pattern. Moreover, it elaborates the challenges to the increasing international trade posed by population boom, environment disruption and resource destruction.The second part starts with the link between the foodborne disease and international trade and expounds how food safety and international trade are influencing each other. It further reveals the link between animal and human health, factors affecting food safety and negative impact of those factors through three examples-BSE, Antibiotic Resistance and Avian flu.The third part summarizes the laws and regulations on food safety in some developed countries such as U.S.A, EU and Japan as well as some worldwide practices like SPS, TBT,GMP and ISO 22000 issued by global organizations such as WTO, WHO and ISO.The last part is the most important one of this paper. It elaborates the present foreign trade and food safety status in China from the aspect of agricultural trade volume, agricultural product structure and export target market. Also, it analyzes the influence of entry into WTO on the agricultural trade, export enterprises and farmers in China. In the end, it sums up the problems in China's present food safety system and proposes its own insights and suggestions on how to construct and update the food safety system in China.Compared with other research papers, the innovation of this paper includes:first, collect and analyze the data on international agricultural trade in 2009, which can reflect the status and trend of international agricultural trade more precisely. Second, it reviews the worldwide regulations and practices on food safety, which offers theory support and makes the suggestions in the next chapter more convincing. Third, the suggestions in the last chapter are proposed based on the former analysis with greater pertinence.Owing to the limited access to related data and theory background, the paper, both in width and depth, needs to improve a lot.