Understanding farmer cooperatives’ self-inspection behavior to guarantee agri-product safety in China

The presence of toxic agri-products, and chemical contamination remain for the existence of smallholder farmers, who are not educated to use agricultural inputs correctly. This inability raises the issue of safety control in the agricultural sector. We proposes that cooperatives’ self-inspection of agricultural products before they enter the market can better organize small farmers to utilize a standardized production and safety management system. An Ordered Logistic Regression Model is employed to estimate the factors that influence cooperatives' choices of inspection frequency. The results show that the respondents expressed a medium to high level of implementing self-inspection but a lower level of concern in testing products by batch. The regression results indicate that subjective norms, the perceived behavioral control of managers, input management, and production documentation significantly affect cooperatives’ self-inspection behavior. The future implementation of safety inspection depends on the extent to which subjective norms, ability, and internal rules can improve agri-product safety in China.