An empirical examination of the effects of local agro-food quality and safety supervision in China

Introduction As the development of China's economy, as well as people's living conditions grows, more concerns have arisen around food safety issues. However, due to uneven resource distribution, the food safety situations between urban and rural areas differ. Compared to the ongoing research on urban food safety, rare attention is given to the study of this problem in rural areas. Objectives Based on the survey result of 892 counties of China, this study is designed to analyze factors that exert influence on the supervision of agro-food quality and safety. Methods In view of the actual conditions in China, 12 variables were selected as the original evaluation indexes in the process of this supervision. Factor analysis was used to figure out the regional difference and major factors influencing the agro-food quality and safety supervision in these counties. In order to analyze the main influencing factors, the counties were divided into four groups according to their composite scores. And the different major factors of these four clusters were given by comparative analysis. Results Through the analysis, this thesis found out that sufficient budget is the most important factor that affects the local agro-food quality and safety supervision, and the overwhelming majority of China's counties enjoy mediocre supervision. Conclusion Furthermore, this thesis also found out that the difference between regions is significant and counties in the east coastal areas have established the most effective supervision institution on the agro-food quality and safety.