Research Of The Disposal Activities And Relative Influencing Factors On Dead Pigs By Farmers

The problems of food safety may have an impact on public health, the food import and export trade, and the growth of economy. Pork and pork products comprise one of the food categories with the largest number of safety incidents. In particular, there has been a constant increase in food safety incidents related to the marketing of dead pork, that has the direct effect on our import and export pork trade. The controlling of dead pork flowing into the market is a complicated, systematic project. The entire processes involve the various stages, such as pig farming, slaughter, processing, transportation, and distribution. Nevertheless, pig farming, as the source of production, which is controlled by farmers, is the most fundamental and critical stage. If farmers who are the main body in pig farming can take the ―first‖ responsibility of disposal of dead pigs harmlessly, marketing of dead pork will be prevented from the source, and food safety risk which is related to dead pigs will be solved. However, due to the complicated reasons, dead pigs were discarded and illegal selling of dead pigs by farmers is very common and popular in China. At the same time, with the growing of the pork supply and the rapid increasing of the dead pigs, dead pigs which are improperly disposed have the obviously negative effects, and destroy the sustainable development of pig farming industry seriously. In view of this, the paper takes the 654 pig farmers in Funing, Jiangsu province for example, adopting the questionnaire survey, new hybrid multi-criteria decision making experiment method and the computer simulation experiment method to study the disposal of dead pigs by farmers and the influence factors.Based on the relative theory and literature review, this paper established the theoretical model that the dimensions and influencing factors affecting the choice behavior on disposal of dead pigs by farmers. Then, selected Funing, Jiangsu Province as the investigated area which plays an important role in Chinese pork trade and pig farming, and applied a method which is a combination of both the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory(DEMATEL) and the analytic network process(ANP)(called DEMATEL-based ANP, DANP) to explore the interrelationships among the dimensions and factors that affect the disposal of dead pigs by farmers, and to identify the important dimension and the critical factors. On this basis, this paper added behavior probability model and used the computer simulation experiment method to further analyze the relationships between the critical factors and the important dimension and the disposal of the dead pigs, simulated the change of the disposal of dead pigs by farmers, and verify the results of the survey research. The main conclusions of this paper are:(1) At this stage, it is very common that the disposal of dead pigs by farmers is improper. The serious lack of the relevant knowledge and educating work in pig farming areas, the incomplete coverage of the government subsidies for harmless disposal, the imperfect of insurance and compensation for dead pigs, the loosen government regulations and the lower penalties which have not deterrence leave space for farmers to choose the improper disposal of dead pigs.(2) Knowledge of relevant laws and regulations, knowledge of pig disease and prevention, costs and profits, scale of farming and pattern of farming are the five critical factors that affect the disposal of dead pigs by farmers. The production characteristic of pig farmers is the important dimension that affects the disposal of dead pigs by farmers.(3) The relationships between knowledge of pig disease and prevention and scale of farming and the disposal of dead pigs by farmers are not simple linear. In a certain range, the higher the degree of knowledge of pig disease and prevention, the greater the probability of pig farmers select harmlessly disposing behavior. However, when farmers’ knowledge of pig disease and prevention arrived the some degree, the selection of pig farmers would not change. By the same way does scale of farming affecting the disposal of dead pigs.(4) The higher the degree of knowledge of relevant laws and regulations, the greater the probability of pig farmers select harmlessly disposing behavior. With the increasing the years of farming experience, probability of pig farmers select harmlessly disposing behavior is lower.