On the Twain Food Supply Chain in China - Impact of Supermarket Development on Agricultural Sector and Agrifood Safety in China

Food safety is attracting more and more attention by sectors of various kinds. However, the contradiction faced by China is the continuous growing safety and quality agrifood market and export demand together with large volumes of distributed and un-organized small-scale rural household production. If we cannot effectively organize agrifood production of distributed rural households, provide technical guidance, and exercise supervision during the production process, it is obvious that it is difficult to supply safety and quality agrifood in large volumes, sustainably and steadily. In the first place, this study has put forward the fact that the rapid development of supermarket in China has created favorable and irreplaceable objective conditions for safety and quality agrifood production in China. The management and supervision costs over supermarket supply chain by the society and government departments are much lower than those in traditional country fairs and wholesale markets. We can adopt the model of "supermarket + leading enterprises (agrifood suppliers) + rural households," to guide thousands of small-scale rural households to access to supermarket supply chains so as to speed up the pace of the popularization of safety and quality agrifood.