THE QUALITY AND SAFETY OF FOOD PRODUCTS AS A FACTOR IN PUBLIC HEALTH: A SOCIO-LEGAL ANALYSIS OF THE MAIN RISKS
Relevance. High-quality and safe food products are the most important factor of public health, ensuring the normal development of society. Hence, ensuring the quality and safety of food products goes into the category of urgent state tasks, the solution of which requires complex organizational, legal and technical measures. Additional relevance of the problem of ensuring the quality and safety of food products is added by the fact that currently the sphere of production and turnover of food products in Russia is subject to a number of potential risks, each of which can pose a significant threat to public health. The analysis of these risks is in great demand in legal science and practice, taking into account the fact that their significant share arises due to the imperfection of the legal framework governing the food market. Purpose. From the standpoint of social and legal analysis to characterize the main potential risks to public health arising in the market of production and turnover of food products in Russia. Objectives: to identify specific factors of the Russian food market, creating threats to public health; to analyze the causes that contribute to the emergence of potential risks in the production and turnover of food products; to formulate the author's recommendations, allowing to improve the mechanism of ensuring the quality and safety of food products. Methodology: logical and formal legal analysis, statistical method, generalization method, comparative method. Results. The sphere of production and turnover of food products in Russia is subject to a number of potential risks, each of which can pose a significant threat to public health. Imperfect legal mechanism to ensure the quality and safety of food products is a determinant of the spread of threats to public health in the Russian food market; The solution to the problem of quality and safety of food products lies in the establishment of a legal consensus between the interests of producers of these products and the interests of its consumers. Conclusions. To minimize the risks to public health arising in the production and circulation of food products, it is necessary to improve the legal framework that ensures its quality and safety. For some groups of goods (alcohol, etc.) it is advisable to use individual digital codes, automatically entered into a single electronic database, allowing you to accurately determine the authenticity of the products sold. It is required to toughen the responsibility of producers and sellers of food products for violation of the rules on its production and turnover; It is necessary to intensify the development of methodological and regulatory framework containing criteria for assessing the safety of human health of a number of materials (including nanomaterials) used in food production; The interests of nature protection and public health require legislative amendments to the regulations on the use of pesticides and other agrochemicals. In addition, the requirements for the examination of the results of registration tests of chemical and biological products to be used in agriculture should be tightened.