Institutional Integration and Risk-Based Food Safety Governance in South Korea: A Structured Narrative Review Using the FAO/WHO National Food Control System Framework.

South Korea is a highly import-dependent food economy and therefore offers a useful case for examining how an integrated national food control system can be built under trade openness, limited domestic agricultural capacity and changing consumer risk perceptions. This article presents a structured narrative review, rather than a causal impact evaluation, of South Korea's transition from multi-agency food safety regulation toward an integrated, risk-based food control system. The review is organized through the FAO/WHO national food control system framework and maps Korean legal, institutional and operational evidence onto six analytical dimensions: legal foundations, institutional coordination, risk-based official controls, import supervision, traceability and recall, and risk communication. Examples of embedded risk-analysis principles include the Positive List System for pesticide residues with a default limit of 0.01 mg/kg for substances without a Korean MRL, inspection orders and risk-ranked import controls, barcode-linked recall blocking through the Hazardous Food Sales Prevention System, and public disclosure of unsafe directly purchased overseas products. Quantitative evidence is used descriptively: Korea's agricultural and food imports reached USD 45.3 billion in 2024, hepatitis A notifications fell from 17,598 in 2019 to 3989 in 2020 after the salted-clam outbreak, and MFDS reported that 12 of 544 overseas direct-purchase products tested in the first half of 2020 contained restricted substances. These indicators suggest improvements in coordination and crisis response capacity, but they do not prove that institutional integration alone reduced foodborne disease incidence. The review finds that South Korea's model is strongest in institutional consolidation, import-oriented technical standards and digital recall communication, while key challenges remain in small-business compliance burden, scientific independence, data transparency, cross-border e-commerce and novel foods such as cell-cultured food ingredients.