Study On Rural Food Safety Governance Of Village Committee

Food industry is the largest pillar industry of the national economy, which is very important to the economic development of our country. However, the sustainable development of food industry in China is facing the challenge of frequent food safety problems. Not only China’s food industry, but also residents’ health are seriously affected by food safety incidents, such as Shuanghui “clenbuterol”, Hunan “cadmium rice”, Jiangxi “poison bean sprouts”. Therefore, the public showed extreme anxiety, frustration and even dissatisfaction to the food safety problems. Food safety problems in rural area are more serious. For example, scattered layout and low aggregation degree of food production and consumption, as well as the limited power of supervision, makes the rural area difficult to monitor. Meanwhile, the rural may also become a dumping ground for unsafe food that is rejected by cities. As a result, food safety problems in rural area are more severe than cities, and become the weakest area in current food safety supervision of China.In order to solve the food safety problems in rural area and not affected by a structure of binary thinking: market failure can be corrected only by the government, while government failure can only be corrected by the market, this paper introduced the village committee to be an important part of rural food safety governance, which would help discover social forces’ role in food safety governance. Based on multi theories and methods of economics, management and sociology, the article built a theoretical analysis structure. On this basis, a questionnaire designed for village cadres is finished. Based on the survey of 1242 village committee in Shandong, Jiangsu, Anhui and Henan Province, the paper measured village committee’s behavior of rural food safety governance in actual situation by using factor analysis and cluster analysis method. Then the paper used ordered Logistic model to explore the main factors influencing the food safety governance behavior of village committee. The main conclusions of this paper are:(1) Village committee should be an important participant in rural food safety governance system. It can mobilize the enthusiasm of farmers, which are the the main body of agricultural products and food consumption in rural area. It can also gather more people to participate in food safety governance, and this can effectively make up for the lack of government management and the self-discipline of enterprises. Therefore, village committee’s gavernance can be an effective way to solve the government and market failure on rural food safety governance.(2)At present, rural food safety governance of village committee is still in the initial stage, and its behavior is not optimistic. A vast majority of village committee has not put food safety governance into basic focus, and food safety governance function has not been taken seriously. Meanwhile, according to the comprehensive measure results, more than 60% of the village committee are relatively poor in food safety governance behavior.(3)Village committee’s behavior includes four factors, such as edible agricultural products safety factor, food safety factor of consumption and circulation, propaganda factor and basic governance function factor, which are respectively corresponding to different governance focus and mode: the production of edible agricultural products and the source governance, the consumption and circulation of food and the effect governance, propaganda and information disclosure, basic function and function driven governance. Then the village committee are divided into four types: the traditional, the starting, the breakpoint and the full-scale, and their comprehensive measure results are very poor, relatively poor, relatively good and very good.(4)Many factors can influence village committee’s food safety governance behavior, and governant’s policy support is its most important influencing factor. The education degree of village cadres, the number of village cadres in village committee, organization image, reasonable law enforcement power and government intervention will also have an impact on village committee’s food safety governance behavior.