The food safety issue: public or private governance?

This paper illustrates the most recent developments of the economic research in the field of food safety. The central issue is that of interactions between public regulations and private strategies in the provision of safety in agrifood supply chains. Current debates on the role of private governance and public regulation in this domain are illustrated and taken in the perspective of recent sanitary outbreaks that have occurred since the nineties (BSE, dioxin-contaminated chicken, to the latest E.coli crisis). The main question is that of the substitutability of public regulation and private standards: may the industry provide a socially satisfying level of food safety and under which conditions? Is there a social economic cost of private intervention in this field? Are economic distortions arising from private strategies justified by the need of consumer health protection? This contribution thus evaluates recent researches that highlight the conditions whereby private governance may be a substitute for public regulation. Starting from a critical approach to this literature, the paper proposes a certain number of factors for a better-focused discussion on the legitimacy of public versus private action relying on recent normative analysis based on the Theory of Industrial Organization.