Comparative Study On Food Safety Administration System In China And United States Of American

This paper uses the food safety administrative system (FSAS) in the United States as reference and studies the differences and similarities of the FSAS between China and the United States. The efficiency of the FSAS does not necessarily depend on how to compartmentalize jurisdictional boundaries of different food safety regulation agencies for food variety (such as meet, poultry, egg products) or food procedures (such as producing, processing, marketing, or consuming). Many different agencies sharing the authority of food safety regulation may lead to overlapping, low efficiency, and resource waste. One coordinating agency (such as National Food Safety Committee) is needed to harmonize activities of different regulative agencies, to clarify the boundaries between agencies, and to improve regulation effectiveness.Sometimes, overlapping and low efficiency of the two countries FSAS causes criticism from government agencies, researchers and the public. It is necessary to continue to reform the FSAS to keep up with the change of society and food consuming pattern. According to the theory of "path dependence", reform of the two countries' FSAS should be under a certain frame. It is very much difficult to break through the recent frame of multi-agency regulation and to consolidate food safety functions into a single agency.Free food market will be failure due to information imperfection and asymmetry. The purpose of the market regulation is to cover information imperfection and information asymmetry. Both FSAS in China and in the United States use law, regulation, food safety criteria, market entry regulation, food label, and food safety certification to help "Credence Goods" move towards "Experience Goods" and "Search Goods". By this way the FSAS will help consumer to save the cost of searching food safety information. Compared with China the food safety law, food safety criteria, regulation on food label in United States are more scientific and comprehensive.At last, with reference to the theory of "path dependence" and "imperfect information and asymmetry information" and combined with the recent FSAS in China, one new FSAS model is constructed for further discussion.