Search Results (4)

This study employs an evolutionary game theory framework to analyze the interactive learning, imitation, and strategic evolution among multiple actors within China’s aquatic product traceability system. It focuses on four types of strategic interactions: between fishers and the government, fishers and consumers, fishers who adopt the traceability system and those who do not, and between consumers who purchase traceable aquatic products and those who do not. The evolutionarily stable strategies and equilibrium outcomes in each game depend on the net benefits obtained and the various costs borne by each party. Among these factors, transaction costs within the traceability system play a particularly critical role in shaping stakeholder behavior. The lower the transaction costs, the more likely stakeholders are to adopt strategies that support or enhance the functioning of the system. Therefore, reducing the operational and transaction costs of the traceability system should be a key policy focus for the government. This includes efforts in policy and regulatory development, platform and infrastructure construction, and the improvement of information exchange mechanisms to foster sustainable development in aquaculture. Full article

China’s outbreak related to cold-chain aquatic product quality and safety in 2020 caused public panic and further led to a crisis in China’s aquatic industry. This paper uses topic clustering and emotion analysis methods to text-mine the comments of netizens on Sina Weibo to study the main features of the public’s views on the administration’s crisis management measures and to provide experience for future imported food safety management. The findings show that for the imported food safety incident and the risk of virus infection, the public response had four types of characteristics: a higher proportion of negative emotion; a wider range of information demand; attention paid to the whole imported food industry chain; and a differentiated attitude towards control policies. Based on the online public response, countermeasures to further improve the management ability of imported food safety crises are proposed as follows: the government should pay active attention to the development trend of online public opinion; work more on exploring the content of public concern and emotion; strengthen the risk assessment of imported food and establish the classification and management measures of imported food safety events; construct the imported food safety traceability system; build a special recall mechanism for imported food safety; and improve the cooperation between government and media, enhancing the public’s trust in policies. Full article

There has been a strong growth in aquatic products supported by the global seafood industry. Consumers demand information transparency to support informed decisions and to verify nutrition, food safety, and sustainable operations. Supporting these needs rests on the existence of interoperable Internet of Things (IoT) platforms for traceability that goes beyond the minimum “one up, one down” scheme required by regulators. Seafood farmers, being the source of both food and food-information, are critical to achieving the needed transparency. Traditionally, seafood farmers carry the costs of providing information, while downstream actors reap the benefits, causing limited provision of information. Now, global standards for labelling, data from IoT devices, and the reciprocity of utility from collecting data while sharing them represent great potential for farmers to generate value from traceability systems. To enable this, farmers need an IoT platform integrated with other IoT platforms in the value network. This paper presents a case study of an enterprise-level IoT platform for seafood farmers that satisfies consumers’ end-to-end traceability needs while extracting data from requests for information from downstream actors. Full article

Current food traceability systems have a number of problems, such as data being easily tampered with and a lack of effective methods to intuitively analyze the causes of risks. Therefore, a novel method has been proposed that combines blockchain technology with visualization technology, which uses Hyperledger to build an information storage platform. Features such as distribution and tamper-resistance can guarantee the authenticity and validity of data. A data structure model is designed to implement the data storage of the blockchain. The food safety risks of unqualified detection data can be quantitatively analyzed, and a food safety risk assessment model is established according to failure rate and qualification deviation. Risk analysis used visual techniques, such as heat maps, to show the areas where unqualified products appeared, with a migration map and a force-directed graph used to trace these products. Moreover, the food sampling data were used as the experimental data set to test the validity of the method. Instead of difficult-to-understand and highly specialized food data sets, such as elements in food, food sampling data for the entire year of 2016 was used to analyze the risks of food incidents. A case study using aquatic products as an example was explored, where the results showed the risks intuitively. Furthermore, by analyzing the reasons and traceability processes effectively, it can be proven that the proposed method provides a basis to formulate a regulatory strategy for regions with risks. Full article