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The provision of food safety is nowadays one of the major imperatives for public authorities worldwide. The most recent food sanitary crisis (E.coli) has drawn attention to the strong interdependences among Economies with respect to food safety. Indeed, the sanitary risk for consumers in a given country also depends on food safety regulations developed beyond geographical borders. In addition, a sanitary crisis may cause revenue losses not only for the offending producers, but also for producers in countries that are not directly concerned. The major food sanitary crises of the nineties (BSE crisis, dioxin, salmonella, etc.) have resulted in both a tightening of public regulations and in the raising of private standards.
Notably, European food safety regulation has been progressively strengthened (e.g. via the tightening of the maximum admitted levels of contaminants in agrifood products), with emphasis on the provision of safe imports from third countries. The strengthening of European legislation, justified by the necessity to assure European consumers’ health, has been source of controversial that relates to the wider debate on the sanitary/economic legitimacy of food safety regulation. Hence, developing countries (DC) often point at these regulations by considering that their successive strengthening, notably with respect to those set by the Codex Alimentarius, implies illegitimate restrictions to the access of their products to the European markets. Hence, a wide economic literature attempts shows that food safety norms may act as non-tariff barriers and significantly hinder developing countries’ exports.
Given these premises, our Editorial Proposal addresses the issue of food safety regulation at international level, by focusing on the role of the supply chain structure and organization and on food chain actors’ strategies, and the related effects on both consumers’ health and developing countries’ access to the international market. Several factors, which are often neglected in existing studies, are taken into account as crucial determinants of both food safety regulation effectiveness and of developing countries’ access to the international market and, more in general, on international supply chains’ performance, such as structural and organizational characteristics of domestic production and export systems, downstream (commercialization and import stages) structure and organization, the nature on vertical relationship among upstream (DC’s producers/exporters) and downstream (importers, retailers) supply chain actors, and the role of the strategic behaviour of supply chain participants.
