Tea Quality And Safety Management Research

Nowadays food safety is of very importance for food production and consumption in the world. As the most popular beverage, the quality safety of tea not only effects its health function, but also its production and trade in a country or region. China is one of main countries of tea production, consumption and trade in the world. An improvement of tea quality is vitally important for sustainable and stable development of tea sector in China. As traditional agricultural product in China, although the problem of food quality safety has become one of important issues in Chinese academic research, it is still not enough to study the quality safety of tea, especially in the fields of such as the particularity of tea quality safety, the impacts of tea producer's and consumer's behaviors on tea safety and the performance in safe tea production at the micro level. According to these considerations mentioned above, the study of the dissertation is conducted.The study outline of this dissertation is as follows: after a theoretic analysis for food quality safety problem, the study started with the particularity of tea quality safety, then an empirical analysis is conducted on the basis of author's investigation data in the province Zhejiang. The empirical analysis concerns tea producer's and consumer's behaviors and their impacts on safe tea production. Additionally, the performance of safe tea production is evaluated from the views of technology, industrial organization and government management, in order to show the internal mechanism of affecting tea quality safety at both macro und micro levels. Finally some institutional conditions and policy options for improving tea quality safety in China under marketablization and internationalization are presented. The dissertation is divided into six parts as follow:After an intensive review on the problem of food safety in international literature, the first part of the dissertation started with a theoretical analysis and discussion about food safety by using the theories of "lemon argument", transaction cost, principal-agent and industrial organization. It concluded with some important implications for studying the problem of tea quality safety.The second part concerns the particularity of tea quality safety. Firstly, it discussed the meaning of tea quality safety from the point of tea quality and safety, and then presented the concept "process safety" which is essential for tea quality safety. Secondly, tea quality safety is evaluated by its some exterior and physical characters as well as by using safety index. Finally, the relation between trade characteristics and quality safety of tea is analyzed to explain the economic characteristics of safe tea production.The third part deals with a comparative analysis of the systems for tea quality safety indifferent countries. It first discussed the basic traits of tea quality safety system in the main import countries such as USA, Canada, EU, Australia, Japan and Korea as well as in the export countries such as Sri Lanka, Kenya and India. The discussion included three different components including legal system, supervisory system and support system. Based these discussions and also considering the actual situation in Chinese tea quality safety system, some main differences in tea quality safety system between China and other countries are presented finally.The fourth part is an empirical analysis of tea producer's and consumer's behaviors by using field investigation data from Zhejiang. On the side of producers, after presenting a general analytic framework for safe tea production, the purpose and behavior of selecting safe production technology by both tea enterprises and households are empirically analyzed to seek the internal mechanism of their changing conducts in tea production. On the side of consumers, after a theoretical analysis of demand and consumer's willing to payment for safe food, an empirically analysis of consumers' knowledge, buying action and willing to payment for safe tea will as well as the influence factors are co...