Concept, characteristics and criteria of food security under the law of Ukraine and other states
Authors: Kovalenko Tetiana 
Published: July 2019

Despite the substantial progress in agro-industrial production development was achieved in the twentieth century, the food problem has not only lost its acuteness, but also turned into a global problem of food safety of mankind. The proper legal regulation of the production of necessary quantity of quality and safe food in the state is a guarantee of food safety of the state.

The concept of food safety is legally enshrined in Art. 2 of the Law of Ukraine “On State Support to Agriculture of Ukraine” (dated June 24, 2004) as the protection of human life interests, which is expressed in guaranteeing by the state of unimpeded economic access of a person to food products in order to maintain his/her normal life activities. This normative definition of food safety has become the subject to substantiated criticism in legal literature, since it reflects only one aspect of Ukraine’s food safety – the economic availability of food for the population.

The food safety has a number of distinctive features, which determine its role in guaranteeing the national safety of the state.

Firstly, the food safety has internal and external aspects. The internal aspect of food safety lies in the functioning of effective mechanisms in the state for guaranteeing human being the access to food products in the quantity and range, sufficient to ensure his/her livelihoods (quantitative measurement), as well as ensuring the proper quality and safety of such products (qualitative measurement). The agricultural legislation of Ukraine provides only a few legal mechanisms to ensure quality measuring of food safety. At the same time, the ensuring the quantitative measurement of Ukraine’s food safety is extremely negative due to difficult economic situation in Ukraine. Legally established minimum wages, scholarships, pensions are not enough to provide a full-fledged human nutrition. The external aspect of food safety is self-sustaining by the state of its food needs in order to reduce the dependence of its economy on food imports.

Secondly, ensuring food safety is an essential condition for the realization of one of the basic human rights – the right to adequate food, which is part of the right to a sufficient standard of living. Thirdly, food safety, in particular its qualitative criterion, is an integral part of the internal environmental safety of citizens, because the use of poor quality and dangerous food products significantly affects human health, can provoke diseases and cause fatalities as a result of food poisoning.

Fourthly, guaranteeing the food safety of the state is a strategic goal of the state agrarian policy. Given the importance of food to ensure human existence, food safety can be considered as a kind of system of economic and social relations, which is the biosocial basis for the existence of both society and the human individual.

In economically developed countries issues of food safety have been subject to considerable legislative regulation. In Ukraine the level of legal regulation of food safety is unsatisfactory. In national agrarian and environmental legislation only quality criteria of food safety are legally defined. Decree of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine “Some Issues of Food Safety” (dated December 5, 2007, No. 1379) approved the Methodology for Determining the Main Indicators of Food Safety. These indicators have been criticized in special literature because they do not take into account issues of quality and safety of food products, peculiarities of development of the agro-food sector as a system-forming for the whole system of food safety.

In Ukrainian legal science the necessity of adopting of a special law “On Food Security” or “On Food Security of the State” was substantiated. But the attempt to adopt a special law, aimed at ensuring the state food safety, was unsuccessful. In 2012 the draft law “On Food Safety” was returned by the President of Ukraine to the Parliament with substantive remarks and rejected by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. By this time relations in the field of food safety remain without proper legislative regulation. Currently, the issue of adopting of a special law of Ukraine, aimed at the comprehensive regulation of relations in the field of food safety, is still relevant.