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Food safety issues are closely connected with the "national economy and people's livelihood" and are of great importance. Doing a good job in food safety supervision, especially in rural areas with relatively backward economic conditions, and building a solid line of food safety supervision is an issue that every food safety supervisor should think about. Due to special circumstances such as scattered and remote residences of rural people and low quality of business and consumer entities, the current rural food safety problems are particularly prominent and the difficulties are particularly complex, making the work of food supervision departments particularly difficult. Recently, the author has conducted a more detailed investigation and research on rural food safety issues in Daxian County. The following analysis and discussion are now conducted.

Characteristics of the rural food consumption market

As early as 2003, the China Consumers Association conducted a questionnaire survey on rural consumption. The results showed that food has become the third most important food after seeds and pesticides. The third product is “the product that rural consumers are most worried about”. Nowadays, in cities, everyone is clamoring for counterfeit and shoddy goods. In order to find a "way out", some unlicensed and unlicensed food, substandard food, expired food, fake and shoddy food "go to the mountains and villages" and flow into the vast majority of people. In rural areas, it has seriously disrupted the rural market order and damaged the health and legitimate rights and interests of rural consumers. Overall, the rural food consumption market mainly presents the following characteristics.

First, business entities are scattered and consumer groups have poor safety awareness. There are relatively few large-scale supermarkets, shopping malls, and bazaars in the food business in rural areas. They are mainly tuck shops, snack bars, fruit and vegetable vendors, and mobile salesmen. They are characterized by wide distribution, remote locations, and inconvenient transportation. Due to their low cultural level, rural food operators and consumers receive little food safety and hygiene propaganda. Most of them lack food safety awareness and do not have a correct understanding of industry standards such as trademarks, origins, production dates, and shelf life dates of regular foods. Not sure about the quality of the product. At present, in the consumption process of farmers’ friends, the consumption orientation is still mainly “price first”. Food with low prices and good sales usually becomes a standing commodity in rural small shops.

Second, the concept of legality is weak and consumer awareness of rights protection is weak. Because rural consumer groups generally have low awareness of the law, weak legal concepts, weak awareness of self-protection, and weak awareness of prevention. When purchasing substandard food and harming one's own health or legitimate rights and interests, the awareness of proactive rights protection is not strong, the channels for rights protection are not well understood, and one is not sure about how to protect one's legitimate rights and interests. In addition, small food business operators in rural areas mostly do "acquaintance business." Once consumers purchase fake and shoddy food, they will often give up protecting their rights due to the favor of "acquaintances" unless their lives are in danger.

Third, the regulatory network is incomplete and there is a large gap in consumer safety supervision. In recent years, the network construction of industrial and commercial 12315 and consumer rights protection organizations has begun to extend to towns, large residential areas and densely populated areas in rural areas. However, in some remote mountain villages and sparsely populated areas, there is still a lack of "tentacles" of consumer rights protection networks. . Rural food business entities are diverse and wide-ranging. In areas where the regulatory network cannot cover it, it is difficult for functional departments to effectively implement supervision, and there is a large gap in food safety supervision.

Difficulties in the supervision of rural food markets

Due to special reasons such as the large flow of business entities, poor awareness of consumer groups’ rights protection, and incomplete construction of regulatory rights protection networks, rural food markets have posed challenges to industry, commerce, health, and quality. The supervision work of inspection and other functional departments has brought many difficulties.

First, the large flow of business entities makes daily supervision of rural markets difficult. Most rural food business entities are small in scale and have little investment. Some of the food they handle is processed and produced by themselves, some is low-quality food imported from some food production workshops with incomplete licenses, and some is "problem" food dumped by urban wholesalers to rural areas. Most of them There is no guarantee in terms of hygiene and quality. Most of the business premises are one's own houses or temporary business points set up on the side of rural roads. In addition, there are some mobile sales by "hawkers"-style small merchants. They change areas from one place to another. If there is a problem, it is not easy to find the responsible person and report it to the functional department. Routine supervision has created a large gap, making it difficult to supervise the rural food market on a daily basis.

Second, due to farmers’ low awareness of rights protection, functional departments have a heavy regulatory burden. As farmers' awareness of the law is generally low, their concepts of law-abiding, legal protection and legal supervision are relatively weak. Most people think that as long as they don't get sick after eating it, it doesn't matter much. In addition, the quality of food business operators varies greatly, and they lack the necessary awareness of food safety. Most of them do not have fixed purchase channels and do not focus on quality, but only seek economic benefits. As a result, three very common phenomena have been formed: poor consumption habits of consumers, poor marketing concepts of operators, and poor awareness of rights protection on both sides of supply and demand, which invisibly increases the burden of industrial and commercial and other functional departments on rural food safety supervision.

Third, due to poor performance of testing equipment, supervision methods are backward and low-grade. For grassroots industrial and commercial offices stationed in rural areas, food safety testing is easy to say but very difficult to implement. Although there are "simple food detection boxes" distributed by superiors, due to their single function and poor detection performance, they cannot effectively detect some fake and shoddy foods.

In daily supervision, law enforcement officers mostly still use traditional primitive methods such as "one look, two smells, and three touches" to judge "problem" foods. Coupled with the constraints of manpower, transportation and other factors, the industrial and commercial departments are very strict about "problem" foods in the circulation field in rural areas. It is difficult to make it disappear.

Fourthly, due to the large differences in industrial standards, it is difficult for functional departments to investigate and make decisions. Currently, there are problems such as overlap, duplication or even gaps among national standards, industry standards, local standards, enterprise standards and other food standards related to the food industry. In addition, affected by factors such as the low cultural quality of business entities, weak legal concepts, poor safety awareness, and lack of responsibility among food wholesalers, purchase ledgers and purchase certificates must be established in accordance with the requirements of the "Special Provisions of the State Council on Strengthening the Supervision and Administration of Safety of Food and Other Products" Systems such as ticket collection are also difficult to implement in the rural food consumption market. There are also reasons such as the lack of testing technology and equipment in grassroots supervision departments and backward testing methods, which to varying degrees have made it difficult to investigate and deal with "problematic" foods.