THE GOVERNANCE DEFICIT OF DIGITAL FOOD SAFETY: BLOCKCHAIN, AI, AND THE REGULATORY RECOGNITION GAP

In 2017, Walmart demonstrated that tracing sliced mangoes from retail shelf to source farm, a process taking 6 days, 18 hours, and 26 minutes conventionally, could be done in 2.2 seconds via Hyperledger Fabric blockchain distributed ledger. This 99.9% compression of traceback time is the most precisely documented efficiency gain in food supply chain history. It is not a regulatory standard. It is not a legal requirement. It is not an evidentiary benchmark. It is a commercially deployed capability operating in a complete governance vacuum. The blockchain food traceability market will grow from USD 3.04 billion in 2025 to USD 52.2 billion by 2035 at a CAGR of 32.9% (Future Market Insights, 2026). The AI food safety and quality control market will grow from USD 2.7 billion in 2025 to USD 13.7 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of 30.9% (BCC Research, 2025), with the broader AI food safety market projected to reach USD 53.5 billion by 2034. FSMA Rule 204 , the most significant traceability regulatory instrument in US history , was delayed from its January 2026 compliance deadline to July 2028, with Congress directing the FDA not to enforce it in the intervening period. The WTO SPS Committee has produced no binding standard governing digital certificate recognition or blockchain record evidentiary status. No court of any jurisdiction has issued a definitive ruling on the evidentiary weight of an immutable blockchain ledger entry in a food safety dispute. This paper introduces the Regulatory Recognition Gap (RRG) , the structural distance between the deployment velocity of digital food safety technologies and the legal, evidentiary, and institutional frameworks required to govern them , and quantifies it as a Technology-Regulation Speed Gap (TRSG) of approximately 8:1 to 11:1. It proposes the Digital Food Safety Governance Architecture (DFSGA) as the three-tier institutional framework for closing it: a Codex Digital Traceability Standard, a WTO SPS Digital Certificate Recognition Protocol, and National AI Food Safety Regulatory Frameworks addressing explainability, liability, and algorithmic consistency.