Food Safety: Between European and Global Administration

Abstract

This article aims at mapping out the existing relationships across three levels of decision making, framing an hypothesis on the functioning of the system. Inter-institutional relationships across different levels of decision making in the area of food safety regulation can be compared to a sandglass the two poles of which are constituted by, respectively, the international and the national legal orders, with the European one standing in the middle. At each turning of the sandglass, the sand flow is "filtered" through European law. This suggests that European institutions are actively engaged in both the bottom-up and the top-down processes of implementation. The paper suggests a model for approaching the trends driving European policies in the area of food safety regulation in both international and national arenas.