THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO THE DEFINITION OF THE WORLD FOOD SAFETY FACTORS AND CRITERIA

The article summarises theoretical and methodological approaches to the definition of factors and indicators of the world food safety. It has been established, that formation and creation of food safety at the necessary level is influenced by a combination of two groups of opposite factors. On the one hand, negative factors which decrease general level of development, and on the other hand, positive factors which correspond to the evolutional development of the economic system. Negative factors can have permanent and temporal nature. Permanent factors include: - population groups, who live below the poverty line and don’t have sufficient income for buying minimum set of food products; - population of territories whose food provision is not carried out by the market mechanisms due to external factors; - unbalanced nutrition on some components threatening the health of certain population groups; - low control of food products safety leading to the fact, that food becomes a threat for life and health of the population; - exhaustion of the natural potential of agricultural production in the country leading to decreasing of the nation’s food supply level. Temporal factors are: - instability of agricultural production and possibility of natural disasters lowering food supply of the nation in certain periods; - great dependence of food supply of the country on external sources in the conditions of unstable conjuncture of world markets and currency earnest from import; - unstable state of the country’s foreign policy in the world which can result in imposing a trade embargo and other similar sanctions. Positive (stabilizing) factors can be divided into such groups as economic, competition, social, innovative, international and legal. The conducted analysis has shown that economic factors are connected with increase in production volumes, acceleration of assets circulation, growth of the work productivity level, decrease of production expenses, increase in income. Competition factors direct economic players to produce the rival qualitative product able to be sold both within the country and abroad. Social factors are aimed at increasing living standards of the population, improving their nutrition structure. Innovative factors are connected with the level of technical and technology development, implementation of research inventions into production, improvement of means and tools of work. International factors are aimed at limitation of import of low-quality production, causing harm to the population’s health and exporting strategic raw materials and products not supplied to the population of the country on a full scale. Legal factors are connected with development of a complex of law regulations obeying which provides increase in living standards, reaching high rates of growth in food production. It was proved, that the nature of food safety is realized in the system of criteria and indicators, and the guarantee of the country’s food safety is a physical and economic availability of food products for different population categories and the degree of satisfying the physiological needs in the energy content of food ration and its components.