a b s t r a c tFood safety issues often arise from asymmetric information between consumers and suppliers with regards to product-specific attributes. Severe food safety scandals were observed recently in China. These events not only caused direct economic and life losses, but also created distrust in the Chinese food system domestically, as well as internationally. While much attention has focused on the problems plaguing the Chinese government's food inspection system, little research has been dedicated to analyzing Chinese consumers' concerns surrounding food safety. In this paper, we measure consumer preferences for select food safety attributes in pork and take food safety risk perceptions into account. Several choice experiment models, including latent class and random parameters logit, are constructed to capture heterogeneity in consumer preferences. Our results suggest that Chinese consumers have the highest willingness-to-pay for a government certification program, followed by third-party certification, a traceability system, and a product-specific information label. The results of this study call for the direct involvement of the Chinese government in the food safety system. A stricter monitoring system will not only improve consumer well-being in the short-run, but also restore consumers' trust leading to a social welfare increase in the long run.

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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate contract farming in China, using vegetable production as a case. Specifically, the authors analyze farmers' contract decisions for different types of contracts, their contract compliance behaviors, and their profitability affected by the contracts both analytically and empirically.Design/methodology/approachThe authors assume growers with alternative risk preferences make the contract decisions to maximize their expected utilities, under exogenous market price risks and contract terms determined by the processor or wholesaler. Both fixed price and floating price contracts are analyzed. Two surveys of 185 and 85 farm households, respectively, are obtained in Shandong province in 2010, and econometric analyses with both Logit and least square regressions are conducted.FindingsThe results indicate that the determining factors for contract farming are related to farmers' risk attitude, gender, yield, farm size and labor availability. However, contrary to the common belief that contracts are a risk management tool for risk averse farmers, the risk lovers tend to use contract farming instead of risk averters. Female household heads and farms with more labors tend not to use contracts, but larger farms with more acreage are more likely to contract. These suggest Chinese farmers' primary motivation of contracting is not market price risk management, but rather seeking better offers and marketing transaction cost reduction.Originality/valueThe authors believe that this is the first econometric study to analyze contract farming allowing different types of contracts in China. The scenarios include cases without contracts, with fixed price contracts, and with floating price contracts, where the contract price changes to reflect the market price, a very unique yet popular situation in China. Each of the cases is also considered under the situation whether default is possible.

Economic development has improved people’s daily diets in China, but food waste has increased significantly. China faces severe natural resource constraints, and reducing food waste is important for ensuring national food security. Based on 1634 survey samples from 28 provinces in China, this study assessed food waste in rural China and empirically analyzed the main factors affecting rural household food waste. The results showed that, on average, 1.67% of food is wasted per household each day in rural China. Food waste is greater in economically developed areas, such as East China. Empirical analysis showed that cooking utensils, preparing the right amount of food, religious beliefs, number of family members, average weight of family members, percentage of purchased grain in the total food consumption in 1 year, and total grain output are significantly related to rural household food waste.

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The increasing share of imported food in developed countries, such as the US and European Union countries, poses new challenges for food safety and quality regulators. China as the world's biggest food producer has the fastest growing share of fish and shellfish exports to these countries. While there have been an increasing number of studies conducted on consumer demand for various food product attributes, little research has been focused on producer behavior, and studies on Chinese food producers are especially absent in the literature. The objective of this study is to assess Chinese aquaculture producers' willingness-to-change (WTC) and adopt certain production practices related to food safety. Producer preferences for enhanced food safety measures, and sustainable/eco-friendly production practices are assessed using a choice experiment. Primary data was collected in the leading aquaculture producing provinces of southern China. The average net income per farmer of our sample was 81,286 RMB/year of which approximately 72% originated from their aquaculture operation. Derived WTC estimates from a random parameters logit model suggest that the representative Chinese producer would require a 2.49 % premium per jin of fish to adopt enhanced food safety practices such as those required for China GAP, and No Public Harm voluntary certifications and they would accept a 3.22% discount before being indifferent between having an antibiotic-free facility and using antibiotics. WTC estimates of sustainable eco-friendly practices and verification by various entities were also assessed. A latent class model (LCM) is used to segregate producers into group with similar underlying characteristics to develop policies to improve producer practices and ultimately product safety and quality.