Willingness of farmers to participate in food traceability systems: improving the level of food safety

In order to solve frequently emerging food safety problems and adapt to the developing trends in the international food safety field, the Chinese government is establishing and developing food traceability systems. Whether or not food traceability systems can guarantee food safety is a problem well worth discussing. Hence, we constructed a theoretical model to explore the effect of incentives in a food traceability system in order to improve food safety levels. The following results were obtained:enhancing the effectiveness of a food traceability system, increasing the payment to farmers who supply safe agricultural products and strengthening the penalty for unsafe food supply actions are necessary conditions to improve the level of food safety. How to encourage farmers to use food traceability systems is another problem explored in our investigation. Based on a field survey on the willingness of vegetable growers to participate using a vegetable traceability system in Beijing, the first city in China to develop such a system, we used a descriptive statistics and a binary logistic regression model to investigate the factors which dominate the decision on the part of farmers to participate in a food safety system. The results indicate that i:younger farmers are more likely to get involved in a food traceability system than older farmers, ii:income from non-agricultural activities decreases the willingness of farmers to participate, iii:the higher the cost-benefit ratio of growing vegetables, the more likely for farmers to engage in a food traceability system, iv:farmers with a great concern for food safety information have a high propensity to participate and v:increased penalties against unsafe food supply actions and high-risk expectation are adverse incentives. In contrast, high-price expectation is a positive incentive for farmers to participate, while agricultural training, government subsidies and being part of an industrial organization will significantly strengthen the confidence of farmers to participate in a food safety system.