New food regulations may impede international trade, but multilateral mechanisms can resolve trade conflicts when they do arise. Food safety regulation in industrialized countries during the 1990s increasingly uses risk analysis in a farm-to-table approach, promotes the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) system, and increases the stringency of standards or creates new regulations for hazards. The 1995 Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement), negotiated by World Trade Organization (WTO) members, establishes a framework to reduce their trade distorting aspects. Three of the principles under the SPS Agreement – science-based risk assessment, equivalence, and harmonization – directly address aspects of food safety regulation that create the potential for trade disputes. In many cases, the science requirements of the Agreement have led to the elimination of unnecessary regulatory barriers to trade. However, some high profile cases remain unresolved because of gaps in convergence around risk management principles that were not spelled out in the Agreement in deference to national sovereignty. The evidence also indicates that there has been limited progress in reducing regulatory transactions costs to trade in food through equivalence or harmonization.