Based On "the Double Failure" Of Food Safety Research

As the most important material foundation for human survival anddevelopment, food plays a very important role in the life of people.Food safety is a measure of people’s life quality and level of socialmanagement, it even relates to economic development and socialstability. But in recent years, Chinas food safety situation is not optimisticand food safety incidents have often happened, especially in2008, themelamine incident of Sanlu milk powder had aroused great shock. From2011, food safety issues have become more serious,"waste oil""stainingbread""beef extract" and other major food safety incidents are comingup. Many well-known companies such as Shuanghui, Mengniu,Wanchaiferry and so on have become the focal point of public due tothe failed in food testing.Food safety incidents hit the consumers’ confidence. Consumersare worried about the food which they eat everyday and questioninggovernment’s ability of food safety regulation. Now, food safety issuesnot only affect people’s health, but also adverse impact on economicdevelopment and social stability. Food safety has already risen to thesocial and national level, as a social management and the matter ofnational security. As an active city with dense population and a largeconsumer market, Shanghais food safety and security task is arduous.Although in recent years, Shanghai’s food industry has madeconsiderable safety management progress, but a variety of factorswhich can result in food safety issues have not been well suppressed. Inparticular, in April2011, the "staining bread" incident deeply hurt theShanghai peoples nerves and caused public anxiety over food safety.This paper takes the food safety situation as the background,collects and summarizes the existing theories of market failure andgovernment failure, combining with the actual situation of Shanghai, analyzes the causes of the Shanghai’s food safety issues from theeconomic point. It analyzes the market failure brought by the foodindustry structural and functional defects and the government failurebrought by the regulatory rules which are not implemented in place. Italso studies the behavior of the game among the government, foodproducers and consumers. In order to solve Shanghai’s food safetyissues, this paper suggests that we should learn from the experience ofdeveloped countries, and rely on the forces of market, governmentand society to jointly solve.