A new paradigm of regulation and management of food safety and quality has been gradually gaining ground. It is based both on the evolution of public standards and the increasing involvement of the private sector, which promotes forms of self-regulation, by adopting standards whose requirements are often higher than public ones. That reflects the needs and wants of consumers to obtain better guarantees on food safety and quality requirements and, consequently, the crucial role that these requirements have in supporting the enterprise strategy in the present day competitive market. The emergence of private standards, operating in various modes of interaction side-by-side with the public standards, has an important impact on the governance of agri-food supply chains. Looking at the literature from national and international perspective, the paper addresses, after an introduction on the role of standards in response to market failures, the incentives for firms to improve food safety and quality by adopting private standards. Then, it examines the integration processes of public and private standards and the related problems of governance of agri-food supply chains, operating increasingly at global dimension. These problems are associated to dominant role of private governance structures in agri-food markets, whose impact is the subject of an ongoing debate. The paper concludes by suggesting potential evolving of some key elements.
