| During 40-year reform and opening up,China’s sustained rapid economic growth has brought about the rapid development of the agricultural industry.At the same time,extensive and disordered increment production mode also brings a lot of problems.On the one hand,the frequent occurrence of agricultural product quality safety accidents,like poisonous leeks and poisonous cowpeas,has intensified the contradiction between the supply and marketing of domestic agricultural products.Consumers show insufficient confidence in domestic agricultural products and also consumption.All these lead to the decline of domestic agricultural economy and the difficulty in increasing farmers’ income.On the other hand,quality safety also has become a major factor affecting the international competitiveness of China’s agriculture,inhibiting the export trade of agricultural products and damaging the international image.Supply-side reform objectively requires the transformation of agriculture from incremental to quality-oriented to ensure the safety of agricultural production.However,correcting the information asymmetry in production and circulation is not achievable in a day,and the imperfect market structure and the double failure of rent-seeking in government management will aggravate the quality and safety dilemma of agricultural products.The quality control of fresh agricultural products is the difficulty in ensuring the supply of safe agricultural products.As fresh agricultural products of great significance to China’s economic development,trade improvement and national competitiveness improvement,the quality and safety of apple should be paid much attention to,and the income increase of apple growers and the efficiency increase of apple industry also urgently need to be solved.How to reasonably introduce new economic subject to improve the effect of quality control is an urgent problem.As an effective carrier linking small farmers and large markets,cooperatives have shown advantages over enterprises and other operators in the supply of safe agricultural products,which is in line with China’s current special national conditions.Cooperatives are put in the multi-principal-agent structure and assume the multi-principal-agent identity for the quality and safety principal-agent problem caused by the principal-agent structure and information asymmetry.Therefore,it is necessary for cooperatives to influence farmers’ safe production behaviors,that is,cooperatives have the power and motivation to control and manage farmers’ safe production behaviors.But its influence process has particularity.In view of this,this paper starts with the principal-agent relationship,and discusses the processmechanism of cooperatives affecting farmers’ production safety behaviors.Firstly,based on the systematic collection and collation of relevant literatures,this paper defines the behavior of farmers’ safety in production and constructs the theoretical framework for cooperatives influencing the behavior of farmers’ safety in production.Secondly,based on the survey data of 1001 apple growers in Shandong and Shaanxi,the endowment characteristics and current situation of safe production behaviors of apple growers are discussed through comparative analysis.The index of safe production behavior of apple growers is adopted,and the index system of safe production behavior of apple growers is established by using entropy method.Thirdly,the endogenous transformation model is used to verify the positive impact of cooperatives on farmers’ safe production behavior.Then,according to the special influence path of cooperatives,the influence process of service function,supervision function and governance structure of cooperatives on the famers’ safe production behavior are discussed respectively by means of principal-agent’s participation in participatory constraint and incentive compatibility.Finally,policy suggestions and research prospects are proposed based on research result.This paper draws the following important conclusions:(1)The safe production behavior of apple growers means that apple growers product safe apple,that is,apple growers guarantee the safe quality of apple and production environment according to the production principles of apple,usage of pesticides and fertilizers reasonably,moderately,normatively and safely,adopting correlative technique like bagging technique.Though apple growers’ cognition and intention of safe production has improved at present,the actual behaviors have some problems and difficulties.The results of the comprehensive indexes of production safety in pest management,fertilizer and water management,bagging management and soil management calculated by entropy method show that the average production safety level of the sample growers was 0.601 and the range is 0.143-1.887.The average safety level of cooperative members is 0.623,and the average safety level of non-member farmers is 0.560.(2)Both the behavior and the decision of farmers joining cooperatives have important positive effects on the safe production behavior.The endogenous processing effect shows that the withdrawal of existing member farmers from cooperative society leads to the reduction of their safety production level.In addition to cooperative,peasant household endowment is also the key factor affecting safe production behavior.Individual characteristics,family characteristics and planting characteristics of farmers all have impacts on their safe production behaviors.Among them,the age of farmers,land transfer and part-time employment of apple labor force will negatively affect the safety production level.However,farmers’ risk attitudes,their own experiences,social networks and planting scale can significantly improve their safe production behaviors.In addition,the government’s guidance to industry also helps the implementation of farmers’ safe production behaviors.(3)The production and social services provided by cooperatives for farmers solve the problem of farmers’ production safety capacity and contribute to the maximization of their incomes.Among the many services provided by cooperatives,pre-production material supply,in-production technical training and guidance,and post-production sales service can significantly improve farmers’ safe production behaviors,but the information service throughout all links of production has no significant impact on farmers’ safe production behaviors.Different service combinations of cooperatives have different influences on farmers’ safe production behaviors.Compared with single service,the pre-production +in-production and in-production + post-production services and more comprehensive production and operation process services provided by cooperatives have obvious promoting effects on farmers’ comprehensive safe production behaviors.(4)The supervision function of cooperatives is an effective incentive for farmers’ safe production behaviors.Cooperative field file management,certification management and brand management can restrain farmers’ adverse selection behavior so as to promote farmers’ safe production behavior.The unified agricultural assets in the prenatal management of cooperatives,the regulation of pesticide and fertilizer lists,the production inspection and villagers’ supervision in the production management,and the postpartum product management,such as the detection of agricultural products,will all have significant impacts on the safe production behavior of apple growers by reducing moral hazard.In order to play a better role,cooperative inspection and villager supervision are necessary for the management of industry.At present,traceability management has no significant impact on farmers’ safe production behaviors.(5)The heterogeneity of farmers’ participation in the system caused by the imperfect cooperative system leads to different extra incentives of safe production for farmers.In order to truly reflect the incentive difference caused by the core-ordinary structure,the structure of cooperative system must be transformed into the system structure of farmers’ participation.Peasant households have equity rights,decision-making rights,payment of membership dues,sharing of dividends in cooperatives,subsidies and economic incentives for safe production behaviors,all of which are conducive to the compliance of peasant households with safe production behaviors.Organizational system norms have a greater impact on the safe production behaviors of farmers with important roles and large-scale farmers,while theactual ownership of rights and economic incentives have a more important impact on ordinary farmers and small and medium-sized farmers. |
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