Economic globalization has greatly changed the pattern of food production and consumption worldwide. As a result, food contamination and foodborne illnesses have also become globalized. A food product can be made in one place with raw materials from multiple regions and exported into the global supply chain, which then transports the food product to distant locations for consumption or further processing. Therefore, food safety incidents in one country can pose substantial risks around the world.

Countless examples demonstrate the seriousness and prevalence of food safety issues at both domestic and international levels. For instance, the United States imports 80% of its annual seafood consumption from 13,000 foreign suppliers in about 160 nations. Yet, when crossing the border, less than 2% of the imports are inspected by the relevant U.S. health authorities. In the United States, contaminated seafood accounts for about 15% of documented foodborne illness, which in total cause approximately 76,000,000 illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5000 deaths annually. In addition, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recently been criticized for its failure to combat "food fraud" in such products as seafood, fruit juice, olive oil, wine, and maple syrup.

Internationally, cross-border food safety crises are no less severe. For example, in 2008, Chinese-made dumplings tainted with harmful pesticides caused over 700 people to fall ill in Japan. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) - a transmissible, neurodegenerative, fatal brain disease of cattle that affects both animals and humans and is commonly called "mad cow disease" - has been weakening the international market for beef and beef products for years. About 180,000 cattle cases of BSE have been confirmed in twenty countries, and more than 200 human cases have been reported in eleven countries. Another recent event involved poisonous melamine-laced dairy products from China - ranging from infant formula to crackers - that affected forty-six countries and caused more than 50,000 cases of infant hospitalization and six reported deaths. The seriousness of such incidents calls for a review of the existing regulatory frameworks. As this Article will argue, there is an urgent need for the global community to develop an effective solution to the problems associated with food safety.

Surprisingly, this critical global problem has been inadequately addressed by scholars, partly because health issues have traditionally been swept under the rubric of trade. Even within the limited pool of works that touch upon issues of food safety regulation, there is much room for more rigorous legal discourse. This Article therefore explores the key regulatory elements for effectively tackling global food safety issues. Part I will provide a description of two of the most striking examples of global foodborne illnesses, offering both a background of how food safety crises traverse national boundaries and an analysis regarding the features common to global food safety problems. Part II will then examine the unilateral approaches taken by states and multinational food corporations in food safety governance. It will contend that national legislation and regulation alone are insufficient to address global food safety problems, and it will conclude that the use of private governance to regulate the cross-border food-supply chain is also an inadequate solution. Part III will then scrutinize the mandates, efforts, and influences of the various relevant international institutions. It will contend that the current international institutions fail to provide a comprehensive regulatory strategy for coping with food safety issues at the global level. This Article will then concude in Part IV by identifying several crucial elements for an international regulatory framework.