ABSTRACT
Introduction Consumption safety is one of the most important attributes consumers consider when purchasing food products. Food safety standards are not only enforced for a specific country’s domestic food products, but also for imported ones to guarantee domestic consumers’ acceptable level of dietary intake of hazardous substances such as pesticide residues, food additives, toxic substances, and microbial contaminants. Despite their primary purpose of protecting consumer safety, food safety standards can detract the food trade. As such, suppliers in countries with less stringent standards bear greater costs when exporting to countries with more stringent standards. Therefore, stringent mandatory standards can raise concerns of constituting non-tariff barriers, particularly from developing countries whose technological capacity of standard compliance is limited (Wilson (2002)). The World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) and Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) Agreements state that trading countries should avoid standard regulations becoming non-tariff trade barriers by deterring trade unfairly.
