Dataset Information

Food safety governance in China: From supervision to coregulation.

ABSTRACT: The food control and regulatory system in China is beset by several challenges. While firms have to reduce their costs in pursuit of benefits, customers are increasingly focusing on safety and quality of food products. Although the Chinese government has developed more stringent regulatory measures, food safety incidents still occur, including abuse of food additives, adulterated products as well as contamination by pathogenic microorganisms, pesticides, veterinary drug residues, and heavy metals, and use of substandard materials. A national food safety strategy has been proposed to assure food safety from "farm to table." This paper begins with the analysis of current food regulatory systems and then discusses cogovernance of food safety management in China. We explore the practice in the city of Shenzhen where government intervention has strengthened food control, thereby creating an opportunity to form a coregulatory system. The review highlights that the current food safety regulatory system of multi-agency structure can inevitably lead to insufficient incentives for business entities. Due to asymmetric information, lack of regulatory resources, and consumer advocacy, coregulation has been developed and is increasingly being promoted as an important instrument of food regulation.

SUBMITTER: Liu Z

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6924309 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Food safety governance in China: From supervision to coregulation.

Liu Zhe Z Mutukumira Anthony N AN Chen Hongjun H

Food science & nutrition 20191120 12

The food control and regulatory system in China is beset by several challenges. While firms have to reduce their costs in pursuit of benefits, customers are increasingly focusing on safety and quality of food products. Although the Chinese government has developed more stringent regulatory measures, food safety incidents still occur, including abuse of food additives, adulterated products as well as contamination by pathogenic microorganisms, pesticides, veterinary drug residues, and heavy metal ...[more]

PMID: 31890192

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Project description:Objective: Given that positive psychological capital motivates citizens to actively participate in social affairs, this study aims to provide insight into food safety risk management in China by empirically determining which individual characteristics are associated with positive psychological capital for actively participating in social co-governance. Methods: A questionnaire-based survey was undertaken between December 5 and 10, 2020. The study participants were residents of Wuxi in China over the age of 18 years. A validated and pretested questionnaires was used to elicit responses with the participants. Student's t-test and one-way analysis of variance were performed to determine which individual characteristics are significantly correlated with the psychological capital of citizens who participate in co-governance. Post-hoc multiple comparisons were performed for each individual characteristic with a significant correlation to determine which categories of these characteristics yielded the significant differences. Study data were analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics 24.0. Results: A total of 752 completed responses were received. Most respondents were females (52.39%), aged 26-45 (66.09%), married (70.48%), company employees (44.28%), and in good health (89.76%). Most had a household size of 3 (55.98%), a bachelor's degree (40.96%), a personal annual income of more than 100,000 yuan (26.46%), and no children aged under 18 (50.27%) or pregnant women (93.22%) in their households. Data analysis indicated that education, income, and health status significantly associate with the psychological capital of citizens to participate in co-governance. Citizens with high education, high income, and good health status have higher psychological capital to participate in co-governance. Conclusion: The present study suggested citizens are likely to actively participate in food safety social co-governance only when they have at least one of the following three characteristics: (1) higher than average income in their city of residence; (2) a bachelor's degree or higher education; or (3) good health. Therefore, motivating citizens to participate in co-governance is a long-term process in China. The fundamental strategy is to increase the income of citizens, especially among low-income groups, promote education to improve the food safety literacy of the public, and improve sanitation and public health.

Project description:Consumers play an important role as one of the main actors in food safety social co-governance. To create a pattern of food safety social co-governance, the active and effective participation of consumers is critical. To encourage consumers to participate in food safety social co-governance voluntarily and positively, we attempted to develop and preliminarily validate a multidimensional questionnaire on consumer psychological capital that could be used to measure the degree of consumer participation in food safety social co-governance. The aim of the initial sample (N = 170) and test sample 2 (N = 204) was to investigate the factor structure of a preliminary measure of consumer psychological capital. A 4-factor model with 23 items explained 61.05% of the total variance in item scores. The aim of test sample 3 (N = 30) was to measure the retest reliability. Test sample 4 (N = 1,076) was randomly allocated to the modeling sample (N = 538) and validation sample (N = 538) to verify questionnaire reliability and validity. Convergent validity, discriminant validity, and the internal inconsistency coefficients of the questionnaire were assessed in the modeling sample. While processing CFA, we deleted 9 items with small standardized factor loadings. The remaining 14 items in the final revised 4-factor model included self-efficacy, resilience, hope, and optimism. The fit indices of the revised four-factor model and second-order factor model in the modeling sample revealed an acceptable model fit. The convergent validity and discriminant validity of the revised model were good and acceptable, respectively. A cross-validation procedure confirmed the appropriateness of the revised four-factor model and second-order factor model in the validation sample. The cross-validation results confirmed that the fit indices of the revised four-factor model fitted the data well and the second-order factor model in the validation sample reached acceptable values. We concluded that the questionnaire developed in this study had good reliability and stable and acceptable construct validity. It could provide a theoretical basis for measuring psychological capital in food safety co-governance.

Project description:Household water food and energy (WFE) expenditures, reflect respective survival needs for which their resources and social welfare are inter-related. We developed a policy driven quantitative decision-making strategy (DMS) to address the domain geospatial entities' (nodes or administrative districts) of the WFE nexus, assumed to be information linked across the domain nodal-network. As investment in one of the inter-dependent nexus components may cause unexpected shock to the others, we refer to the WFE normalized expenditures product (Volume) as representing the nexus holistic measure. Volume rate conforms to Boltzman entropy suggesting directed information from high to low Volume nodes. Our hypothesis of causality-driven directional information is exemplified by a sharp price increase in wheat and rice, for U.S. and Thailand respectively, that manifests its impact on the temporal trend of Israel's administrative districts of the WFE expenditures. Welfare mass (WM) represents the node's Volume combined with its income and population density. Formulation is suggested for the nodal-network WM temporal balance where each node is scaled by a human-factor (HF) for subjective attitude and a superimposed nodal source/sink term manifesting policy decision. Our management tool is based on two sequential governance processes: one starting with historical data mapping the mean temporal nodal Volumes to single out extremes, and the second is followed by WM balance simulation predicting nodal-network outcome of policy driven targeting. In view of the proof of concept by model simulations in in our previous research, here HF extends the model and attention is devoted to emphasize how the current developed decision-making approach categorically differs from existing nexus related methods. The first governance process is exemplified demonstrating illustrations for Israel's districts. Findings show higher expenditures for water and lower for energy, and maps pointing to extremes in districts' mean temporal Volume. Illustrations of domain surfaces for that period enable assessment of relative inclination trends of the normalized Water, Food and Energy directions continuum assembled from time stations, and evolution trends for each of the WFE components.

Dataset Information

Food safety governance in China: From supervision to coregulation.

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Food safety governance in China: From supervision to coregulation.

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