Consumers' Willingness To Pay And Safe Food Supply

"Hunger breeds discontentment, Food safety is the most important?"The protection for food quality and safety has been an important part of all governments agricultural policy. However, for a long historical period, the pursuit of agricultural production to solve the problem of food and clothing constitutes an important part of China's agricultural policy objective function because of the inherent constraints of our country economically underdeveloped, which results in Chinese goverment more or less ignored the issues of food quality security.As a result, the problem of food quality and safety becomes more and more serios. This paper attempts to study China's food quality and safety issues from the perspective of economics.However, the problem of food quality and safety is a macro issues, so it is not possible to study all aspects of food quality and safety management system.Therefore, this article is mainly based on the demand and supply of safe food and combine with the characteristics of China's agricultural management system to research the Chinese food quality. Aeeording to the background and relevant researehes home and abroad, the PaPer defined the intension and extension the intension and extensiono food safety seientifically, sununarized the major factors that affects food safety and its development through the development exeriements, which provides a theoretical preparation for the follow-up study.In fact, there still exists many problems in our nation's food quality and safety management system, morever, the full supervision mode of "from farm to table" can't be implemented in our nation, which results in consumers in the face of three possible scenarios when they make purchasing decisions: the first scenarion is to purchase the food without information, the second to purchase the food with informaion the provided by producer, the third to purchase the food that he knows it very well. So the consumers have three possible willingness-to-pay correspondingly. According to Akedofs view, If consumers strust the quality and safety information provided by government authority, Consumers will pay a premium, and the their willingness-to-pay will not have much difference as that in the third scenarion. In order to determine the influencing factors of the probability distribution of the price changes in value in different circumstances, the multi-logistic model and tobit model is used in this article.The research results show that, after Controling the variableof income level, age, level of education, number of household, gender, information reliability, risk perception and so on, the information of Pesticide residues provided by producers only have a limited influence on the consumer's willingness-to-pay, there exists a significant lack of effective demand in high quality food. However, However, if consumers can get accurate and reliable quality and safety, they are willing to pay higher prices for low pesticide residues in tomatoes.Because the relationships bentween demand and suply are causal, if the consumer under scenario3has a high willingness to pay, then there may exist corresponding supply to meet this demand in market. Meanwhile, consumers do not want to pay a higher premium for some food with the certification provided by authority, which reflects the consumers' doubts on the credibility of food certification.In this paper, the traditional farmers of surrounding contract farming is used as an example.we adopt the logistic model to resaearch the safety production behaviorof traditional farmers, The empirical results show that, household income, years of production, the risk of farmers using pesticides the price of tomatoes, contract farming's planting base for more than two years history and so on, have a significant impact on safety production behaviorof traditional farmers, but the parameter estimates of education does not pass the test of significance. And the policy implications is also pointed out: first, in order to reduce the use of highly toxic pesticides, government should give contract farming subsidies to encourage enterprises creating a favorable environment for technical guidance to farmers around. Second, improve the food quality standard system to provide producers with good behavior specification. Third, establish a sound legal and regulatory systemand increase the quality of the food safety supervisionto prevent farmers fortunately psychological.Farmers only produce food primary products, a considerable part of that needs to be further processed. So, improving food quality management system can not ignore the food processing enterprise's quality control behavior. According to the evolution economics' point, under normal circumstances, the enterprises choose their strategy often based on the history of the payoff. When the statistical results shows that, if average income of strengthening the quality and safety management is higher than that of relaxing quality and safety management, the strategy of strengthening the quality and safety is choosed, on the contrary, the relaxing of the quality and safety choosed. The results showed that in the absence of government regulation, any single enterprise choosing long-term strategy of strengthening quality control is not the an optimal one, because once the adversaries use the strategy of the relaxing quality management, its revenue will be relatively low, which results in itself being eliminated by other competitors;However, the long-term to choose the relax he strategy of the relaxing quality management is not the optimal one too. So enterprises' optimal choice is sometimes to choose the strategy of strengthening quality controlment, sometimes to choose e relaxing quality managemen. If the evolutionary steady strategy shows that enterprises' optimal choice is sometimes to choose the strategy of relaxing quality management, the government should establish appropriate incentives to give some rewards to enterprises which choose the the strategy of strengthening quality controlment. However, under the conditions of the asymmetric information, the level of enterprise' effort can not be completely observed by gogernment, enterprises' risk of incentive will increase.So enterprises will not obey the government's exhortatio, Incentive mechanism will be ineffective.The full regulatory approach of "from farm to table" must be introduced.However, government regulation may exist the same issue (government failure), From the current situation, China's food quality management system exists following problems:First, the information service system is imperfect, so it can not solve the problem of market failures due to information asymmetries between consumers and producers, which can be illustrated by sa follows:(1)Information serious split, and lack of information sharing mechanisms;(2) information on the comprehensive utilization rate is not high, and lacks of scientific and effective risk analysis. Secondly, the food quality standards system is imperfect and can not effectively regulate the behavior of the producers:(1) The standard system is the lack of uniformity and coordination and can not effectively guide the behavior of the main food suppliers;(2) standard-setting work lags behind the need of consumers;(3) the draft of standards lack of scientific basis, third, food quality and safety inspections is imperfect, and can not effectively meet the consumers'information needs on food quality and safety:(1) the system is not perfect, the aspects and objects and geographical scope of spection and monitoring is limited, the level of inspection and monitoring is very low,(2) risk monitoring and the construction of early warning capabilities is lagging behind,(3)the level of detection is uneven, and each department is not closely linked;finally, there are many problems in the system of food quality and safety laws and regulations, and can not effectively regulate producers'opportunistic behavior, as follows:(1) the existing legal and regulatory system is far from complete, operability is not strong;(2) penalties for violations is light, the cost of illegal is low.Government failure is an objective phenomenon, any country will continue to exist at any time.However, compared to Western developed countries, there are very serious problem in our country's food quality and safety management system, the role of the "visible hand" is not very obvious.Therefore, it is necessary for our country to learn from the successful experience of developed countries.From the practice, developed countries' food quality and safety management system has the following features:sound quality and safety regulatory system; maturing traceability system; clear responsibilities and a rigorous regulatory system; severe punitive measures. After understanding the basis of factors that affect the quality and safety of food and learning from foreign food quality and safety management experience, this paper proposes to strengthen China's food quality and safety suggestions: improving the food quality management system, improving the system of food standards, improving the food inspection system, improving the system of laws and regulations as well as information service system.