European food safety regulation and the developing countries: Regulatory problems and possibilities

This paper examines the European Community's food safety regime in order to identify those legal measures that cause the most problems for developing countries' exporters of food products and to point to possible solutions. It is shown that barriers may arise due to an array of requirements, some of which may appear to be rather minor legal amendments, such as changing a sampling plan. There is no easy solution to this problem, but three specific meas-ures are proposed: Firstly, improved harmonisation of food safety measures in the industrial-ised countries. Secondly, when proposing new food safety measures the European Commis-sion should identify the proposal's likely consequences on developing countries - and should explain how alternative measures will affect both food safety and the developing countries. And lastly, the European Community should strengthen its provision of development assis-tance to enable the developing countries to comply with the food safety standards.