Symposium Introduction - Food Law: Challenges and Future Directions

Abstract

Food law, viewed in historical context, through the lens of recent human rights instruments, and in the glare of modern globalisation, is necessarily international. However, as yet international approaches toward trade restrictions and tariffs, provision of aid, processes to regulate the growing,
sale, contamination, labelling and distribution of food, as well as crop production are substantially at variance. So too are legal responses, including criminal liability, coronial inquests and the civil liability of regulators. However, there is much to be said for better discourse about such matters at an international level through an International Association
of Food Law and Policy in order to explore the potential to reduce inconsistencies, based upon scientific approaches to health and safety and the creation of coherent approaches to what are essentially transnational dilemmas.