The Research On China’s Imports Of Food Safety Regulatory System

With the continous development of China’s international trade in recent years, the food import has been rising and food varieties have also been expanding, which brings some new situations for the safety regulation work on China’s imported food. The reasons for this are as follows:first, in recent years, with the rapid development of science and techonology and the progress of the society, news media has increased coverage on food safety incidents, which greatly promotes the transparency of food safety information and draws widespread concern from the whole society about food safety. Second, with the food safety standard becoming stricter, food safety inspection level being higher and China’s government continuously improving food safety regulatory functions, potential safety problems concerned imported food gradually entered into public view. Third, with the gradual increase of safety problems concerned imported food, there has been a higher requirement on such aspects as the full time supervision ability on the part of the imported food safety regulatory department, risk management and the capability to respond to food safety emergencies, etc. Thus, it will be a long-term, difficult and complicated work to build an imported food safety supervision system in China so as to effectively strengthen food safety regulation and prevent and control the impact of food safety risk on China’s economy and society.In recent years, the Chinese government has been attaching great importance to food safety supervision and successively promulgated a series of laws and regulations based on China’s actual conditions to ensure the food safety, which improved the national food safety regulatory system and the general level of the food quality in China. However, food safety regulation is a new situation that Chinese government is facing now, thus it is of great importance to establish a sound system of regulation and a persistent effect mechanism to strengthen the food safety regulation and ensure the food quality and food safety in China. Although in recent years thoses measures such as policy adjustment and system improvement have promoted the imported food supervision of the regulatory function department in China to some extent, Chinese government still lags behind in terms of imported food inspection level and full time supervision ability when compared with developed countries.The first part of this paper is an investigation on the theories related to food safety regulation. First, the author expounds those theories and makes an analysis of the theoretic basis for the government regulation functions on food safety from the pespective of public goods theory, market failure and government intervention theory and public governance theory. Then the author suggestes that Chinese government should improve food safety regulation laws and regualtions as well as various food safety inspection standards through government intervention so as to avoid harmful external influence of the public goods to the largest extent and to avoid food safety incidents caused by system vulnerability.The second part of this paper is an analysis of the present status of China’s imported food safety regulatory system. The author summarizes the problems existed in the present imported food safety regulatory system after making an analysis on such aspects as the legal basis of China’s imported food safety regulatory system, food safety standard system, regulatory department, etc.In the third part, the author summarizes the successful experiences for China’s reference after making an analysis of the food safety regulation system in USA, EU, Japan and Canada.In the last part, the author puts forward some suggestions on the development and improvement of China’s imported food safety regulatory system based on China’s actualconditions.