Do Chinese Farmers Misuse Pesticide Intentionally or Not?

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Tittle of the manuscript: Do Chinese Farmers Misuse Pesticide on Purpose? Based on Incidents Shock and Yield Fluctuation Avoidance.

The title doesn’t not reflect the ideas of the manuscript, please modify

The abstract should include more specific information is a bit general. Key results and conclusions should be more explicit. 

In general, the manuscript should be structure with an Introduction, methodology, results, discussion and conclusions. Section needs more demarcation.

The introduction is short and the aim of the study should be included.

Line 392 The Table 6 should be modified, it’s not clear.

Line 398 until 415 All the statement is not clear. Please clarify the ideas.

Table 7, All the factors included are not explained in the methodology and why were chosen.

The findings of the work may appear to be trivial if are not well discussed in the context of the extant body of literature. Authors can build a discussion to help readers to follow the logical development of the manuscript. Discussion section should be included to build the arguments in favor of how this work contributes to theory and risk assessors. All the statement included in the section 4 Discussion are not supported by difference scientific references. Please improve this section.

Conclusion should not be a summary of your study or an extension of the discussion of results. The presented work has some merits, but at the same time, the provided future research directions appear to be trivial.

The english grammar and style should be checked throughout the manuscript

Author Response

We would like to thank the reviewers for their constructive comments and insightful feedback, which greatly helps improve our paper quality! We greatly appreciate the time taken to carefully go through each line of the paper and suggest the appropriate next steps. We have addressed the reviewers’ comments and our responses to the reviews’ comments are in blue font.

Reviewer 1

1. Tittle of the manuscript: Do Chinese Farmers Misuse Pesticide on Purpose? Based on Incidents Shock and Yield Fluctuation Avoidance. The title doesn’t not reflect the ideas of the manuscript, please modify.

Response: The new tittle of the manuscript is “Do Chinese Farmers Misuse Pesticide intentionally or not?”

2. The abstract should include more specific information is a bit general. Key results and conclusions should be more explicit. 

Response: The abstract has been re-written just as follows:

“Abstract: The non-standard pesticide application behavior leads to the excessive pesticide residue and even affects quality and safety of agricultural products and agricultural sustainability. Based on 968 valid samples randomly selected in Jiangsu Province of China, it focuses on the impact of incident shock and yield fluctuation avoidance on the pesticide application behavior of farmers, and then investigated the impact of intentional factors such as insufficient cognition and lack of knowledge on their improper pesticide application behavior. This study shows that besides the pursuit of improper income, the inadequate awareness and the preventive actions to avoid operational risks are also an important factors of farmers' non-standard pesticide application. In addition, the study also shows that farmers who understand the responsibility unit of agricultural product quality and safety supervision are more inclined to choose standardized application of pesticides. The higher the education level of farmers, the higher the probability of standardized application of pesticides. Therefore, farmers' non-standard pesticide application behavior is largely due to the farmers' in-sufficient awareness of the harm of pesticide residues or the lack of trust in the efficacy of pesticides. Moreover, the study also shows that adverse selection phenomenon exists in the pesticide application training.”

3. In general, the manuscript should be structure with an Introduction, methodology, results, discussion and conclusions. Section needs more demarcation.

Response: Thank you for your comment. Correction has been made as suggested.

4. The introduction is short and the aim of the study should be included.

Response: As suggested, we make the introduction longer and the aim of the study has been included in the part of introduction. Please see details in page1 and page 2. Some important sections on the aim of this study are as follows:

“Overall, although extensive literature has been carried out on the pesticide application behavior, few studies clearly distinguish intentional and interest oriented excessive pesticide application behavior from the unintentional behavior. According to the theoretical analysis of farmers’ pesticide application behavior, this paper constructs the measurement variable reflecting farmers' unintentional non-standard pesticide application behavior. Based on the survey data of 968 sample farmers, the effects of main independent variables on three kinds of illegal behaviors, such as excessive application of pesticide, banned pesticide application and ignoring pre-harvest interval (PHI), are systematically tested.”

5. Line 392 The Table 6 should be modified, it’s not clear.

Response: Combined with the first comment of Reviewer 2, we have deleted consistency test of three types of dependent variables. Table 6 is not necessary to the part of robustness test and has been deleted from the old manuscript.

6. Line 398 until 415 all the statement is not clear. Please clarify the ideas.

Response: Thank you for pointing this out. They have been re-written as follows:

“We define a new pesticide application behavior variable behavior, which is summation of the three types of pesticide application behavior value. When behavior is equal to 3, it means that all the three dimensions of pesticide application behavior including application dosage, pesticide types and PHI are non-standard. When behavior value is 0, it means that all the three dimensions of pesticide application behaviors are normative. As the value of behavior increases, farmers' pesticide application behavior gets worse. Of all participants, 532 (54.96% of the sample) do not have any of the three dimensions of non-standard pesticide application behaviors and their values of the variable behavior are 0; 32 participants (3.31% of the sample) have the behavior value as 3, indicating these participants have all the three dimensions of non-standard pesticide application behaviors; participants with behavior value as 1 and 2 account for 29.86% and 11.88% of the sample, respectively. Overall, although the percentage of participants who have the three dimensions of non-standard pesticide application behaviors is not high, the percentage of participants who do not have any of the three dimensions of non-standard pesticide application behaviors is less than 60%.”

7. Table 7, All the factors included are not explained in the methodology and why were chosen.

Response: As suggested, factors are explained in the methodology. Some important sections are as follows:

“2.2.2. Model setup

We use the following econometric model to investigate whether farmers' non-standard pesticide application behavior is unintentional, and to test the influence of related factors on farmers' pesticide application behavior.

where  denotes pesticide application behavior of individual farmer i, is a vector of the main independent variables,  is a vector of control variables of related cognition,  is the vector of the control variables of individual characteristics, 、 and  are the estimated coefficient vectors,  and  are the constant term and random error, respectively.

(1) Dependent variable

Different pesticide application behavior will bring different levels of quality and safety risk for agricultural products. The effects of pesticide dosage, pesticide variety and PHI on pesticide application behavior are investigated in this study, respectively.

In recent years, dosage per mu of pesticide application was far more than the reasonable level in China. The choice of pesticide dosage will have a great impact on pesticide residue of agricultural products, which will lead to the quality and safety risk of agricultural products. Regarding the question "what is the choice of pesticide dosage when using pesticide", the survey results show that 61.88% of farmers choose "according to prescribe dosage of the instructions", 7.23% of farmers choose "less than prescribed in the instructions." Participants who choose "a little more than prescribed in the instructions" and "more casually" respectively account for 21.90% and 7.23%, and that will increase the quality and safety risk of agricultural products due to the non-standard pesticide application dosage.

From the perspective of the choice of pesticide variety, the impact of pesticide on the quality and safety of agricultural products is not only shown in the aspect of pesticide dosage, but also the toxicity of pesticide. The pesticide variety is continuously updated and medium or high toxic pesticide are phased out with the society development, advances in technology and increased awareness of sustainability. Low toxicity or biological pesticide has become the main stream of pesticide application. However, the banned pesticide application and highly toxic pesticide often happen to pursue of efficacy or cost savings in the actual pesticide application, which cause many quality and safety outbreaks of agricultural products. Regarding the question "will you choose the pesticide banned by the country when choosing the pesticide?"  60.43% of participants choose "no", and participants who choose "(probably) will, because I don't know what is banned pesticide in the country" account for 28.10%. There are still 11.47% of participants who choose "yes, as long as no one caught it." Although there might be some bias in the hypothetical surveys, the results still show that some farmers do not know how to choose pesticide variety and there are large latent risks. In addition, 28.10% of participants are not clear about what pesticide is banned and may choose banned pesticide. It also preliminarily shows that some farmers’ illegal pesticide applications are unintentional behavior to some extent.

In addition, if pesticide applied is not fully degraded, it will still likely cause excessive pesticide residues and further cause quality and safety risk of agricultural products. Regarding the question "do you consider preharvest interval?" the results show that participants who consider PHI account for 69.83%, and those who do not consider PHI account for 30.17%. It shows that there are still high risks in the specific operation of PHI in China.

(2) Main Independent Variables

According to the theoretical analysis, the impact of information about agricultural products’ quality and safety outbreaks, yield effect and government regulation are mainly included as the independent variables. Agricultural product risk and safety outbreak information will affect farmers' cognition of harm of pesticide residue to some extent, which is the main variable to measure whether farmers have non-standard pesticide application unintentionally. During the investigation of quality and safety incidents of agricultural products such as " toxic cowpeas " and "poisonous ginger" caused by pesticide residue, participants who choose “have heard of” account for 75.21%, and participants who never heard of such events account for 24.79%. In recent years, events of vegetable’s quality and safety problems such as toxic cowpeas (Xinhua, 2010, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-02/27/content_9514301.htm), poisonous ginger (China Daily, 2013, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2013-05/09/content_16486816.htm) have occurred in China frequently. It shows although farmers are the main producers of agricultural products, nearly 1/4 of the farmers haven't heard about the related quality and safety events of agricultural products, which also reflects low rate of information access on the quality and safety of agricultural products to some extent. As a realistic education, the quality and safety events information of agricultural products have not been heard of, which may affect the farmers' attention to the quality and safety of agricultural products to some extent, and further affect pesticide application behavior. From the farmers' cognition of the impact of pesticide application status on the agricultural products yield, high intensity and non-standard application behavior of farmers is largely due to the doubts on the pesticide effectiveness. Theoretically speaking, the pesticide application with standard dosage can guarantee the pesticide effectiveness. However, some farmers have strong risk perception and expect to use excessive input or high toxic pesticide make sure the effectiveness. The survey shows that 20.66% of participants think standard pesticide dosage can’t guarantee pesticide effect, and largely affect agricultural products yields. Participants who believe standard pesticide dosage have certain influence on yield account for 50.41%, and 28.93% of participants think that the standard pesticide dosage can achieve the corresponding effect and guarantee agricultural products yield. In addition, the government supervision on the quality and safety of agricultural products is intended to regulate the farmers’ quality and safety behaviors of agricultural products, which theoretically will also affect pesticide application behavior. As for the question "whether there is local supervision on the quality and safety of agricultural products?" the survey shows that 39.05% of participants choose “hardly any,” 53.51% choose “occasionally,” and only 7.44% choose “often.” Therefore, the level of quality supervision on agricultural products is not high in China.

Based on previous literature, such as Asmare et al. (2022) [1], Wang et al. (2017) [4], other relevant variables are considered as control variables in the study. Specifically, the recognition of regulatory department, understanding of the relevant laws and the status of agricultural products certification are used as control variables for farmers' awareness of government regulation of agricultural products; Whether agriculture can be irrigated with waste water is used as control variable for the farmers' cognition of common sense; The judgment of quality and safety status of agricultural products are used as control variables for farmers' cognition of the quality and safety environment of agricultural products. The summary statistics for these variables are shown in Table 2.

8. The findings of the work may appear to be trivial if are not well discussed in the context of the extant body of literature. Authors can build a discussion to help readers to follow the logical development of the manuscript. Discussion section should be included to build the arguments in favor of how this work contributes to theory and risk assessors. All the statement included in the section 4. Discussion are not supported by difference scientific references. Please improve this section.

Response: Discussion has been re-written in most places just as follows:

“4. Discussion

Inappropriate use of pesticides by farmers is common in developing countries. For example, there are studies that show that 100% of the sampled farmers in Vietnam, 73% in Cambodia and 59% in Laos overused pesticides [35]. Zhao et al. (2018) found that many farmers still use pesticide 666 [36], which is banned in China since the 1980s. Inappropriate use of pesticides can have a significant impact on the environment, food safety and the health of farmers. In order to improve farmers' behavior and reduce inappropriate use of pesticides, it is necessary to investigate the causes of farmers' improper use of pesticides. There have been many studies on the influencing factors of farmers' pesticide application behavior. For example, the influence of attitudes, subjective norms, moral norms, perceived behavioral control, and knowledge on farmers' pesticide application behavior was analyzed based on the theory of planned behavior [37]. According to Schreinemachers et al. (2019) 's investigation and research on farmers in Southeast Asian countries, Pesticide overuse was positively associated with men in charge of pest management decisions,  farmers seeking advice from pesticide sellers and a strong belief that pesticides are effective [35]. Cai et al. (2021) use data collected from 452 apple farms in Shaanxi and Shandong provinces in 2017, and find that 70.6% of apple farms engage in excessive pesticide use, with farmers that have higher risk aversion more likely to overuse pesticides [38]. Some studies have also focused on the intentional improper use of pesticides by farmers in pursuit of improper benefits [39]. There are few literatures that divide the influence factors of farmers' pesticide application into two aspects: unintentional and intentional. It is of great significance to clarify the subjective intention or non-intention of pesticide application for farmers to put forward corresponding countermeasures.

This study shows that some farmers believe that standard application of pesticides does not guarantee the proper yield of agricultural products. This makes these farmers choose to over apply pesticides. Some farmers have not heard of the agricultural product quality and safety problems caused by pesticide residues such as "toxic bean sprouts" and "toxic ginger", and have not been directly impacted by the corresponding agricultural product quality and safety problems. This makes the cognition of agricultural product quality and safety risk inadequate, resulting in non-standard pesticide application behavior. In addition, the study also shows that farmers who understand the responsibility unit of agricultural product quality and safety supervision are more inclined to choose standardized application of pesticides. The higher the education level of farmers, the higher the probability of standardized application of pesticides. Therefore, farmers' non-standard pesticide application behavior is largely due to the farmers' insufficient awareness of the harm of pesticide residues or the lack of trust in the efficacy of pesticides. This study enriched the research on the influencing factors of farmers' improper use of pesticides from different perspectives, and provided research support for putting forward corresponding policy recommendations.

Moreover, similar to this paper, Wang and Liu (2021) used this data to compare the influence of Farmers' attitudes and government supervision on the application of pesticides by farmers [40]. Compared with the previous article, this paper changed the research perspective, focusing on the impact of event information shock and yield fluctuation avoidance on the pesticide application behavior of farmers, and then investigated the impact of subjective and intentional violation factors such as insufficient cognition and lack of knowledge on their improper pesticide application behavior. This paper can be regarded as a further supplement and extension to the study of Wang and Liu (2021).

According to this study, lack of knowledge is an important cause of improper pesticide application behavior of farmers. Therefore, in order to improve pesticide application behavior of farmers and reduce the impact of pesticide abuse, information and knowledge should be provided to farmers, such as strengthening relevant training. Strengthening training is the main measure to correct farmers' pesticide application behavior and alleviate the risk of agricultural product quality and safety caused by unintentional factors. The willingness of farmers to participate in training was also investigated in the survey, but the results were not satisfactory. Farmers who chose to participate in free agricultural product planting safety training accounted for 54.55% of the total sample, farmers who chose to see the situation accounted for 28.20%, and 17.25% of the sample farmers chose not to participate. Farmers' participation in quality and safety training of agricultural products is not high. Therefore, in order to better correct the improper application behavior of farmers, in addition to training farmers, it is necessary to improve the participation rate of training through incentives and other methods, so that farmers can obtain relevant information about pesticide application and its impact.”

9. Conclusion should not be a summary of your study or an extension of the discussion of results. The presented work has some merits, but at the same time, the provided future research directions appear to be trivial.

Response: Thank you for your suggestion. Conclusion has been re-written as follows:

“5. Conclusion

The quality and safety problems of agricultural products are largely due to farmers' improper pesticide use behavior. Therefore, the improvement of quality and safety of agricultural products and the agricultural sustainability mainly depends on the improvement of farmer's behavior. Pesticide is one of the major quality and safety risk sources of agricultural products, which makes regulation of farmers' pesticide application behavior become the key to reduce the quality and safety risk of agricultural products. On one hand, improper pesticide application behavior is for pursuing improper income, on the other hand, some farmers have inadequate cognition and avoid the risk of agricultural management, which leads to improper pesticide application behavior, and the “unintentional” actions increase the quality and safety risk of agricultural products. To test this hypothesis, the survey data of farmers in Jiangsu Province of China is used to investigate the standardization of pesticide application from the aspect of pesticide application dosage, pesticide variety and PHI. How the factors such as incidents shock and yield fluctuation avoidance impact famers’ pesticide application are further studied. The results show that the cognition of standard pesticide application’s impact on product yield and the awareness of agricultural product quality and safety incidents have significant effects on all the three dimensions of pesticide application behavior. Specifically, the farmers who think pesticide application with prescribed dosage can’t guarantee agricultural products yield and the famers who have not heard about the quality and safety incidents of agricultural products tend to over use pesticide, use banned pesticide and ignore pesticide withdrawal before agricultural products harvest. The result shows that the non-standard pesticide application behavior is influenced by cognition of quality and safety hazard of agricultural products and uncertainty of pesticide efficacy. It indicates that the "ignorance" about the quality and safety hazard of agricultural products and the "unintentional" violation to ensure the stable agricultural product yield are also important reasons for non-standard pesticide application besides the intentional violation to get improper profits.

Therefore, to improve agricultural sustainability and reduce the quality and safety risk of agricultural products in China when regulating the non-standard pesticide application behavior, it needs not only to strengthen supervision to prevent the occurrence of intentional misconduct, but also to provide education to improve farmers’ knowledge and thus correct their unintentional wrong pesticide application behaviors. Based on these findings, we provide the following implications and conclusions.

First, it is necessary to improve farmers’ cognition. The survey shows that Chinese farmers have inadequate cognition about the quality and safety of agricultural products, and many farmers do not know the varieties of banned pesticide, as well as PHI. At the same time, some farmers believe that pesticide application with standard dosage will decrease yields, which leads the non-standard pesticide application behavior to some extent and impacts on the quality and safety of agricultural products in China. Thus, the farmers' cognition should be improved through clear labeling, education or training.

Second, it is vital to make farmers aware of food safety incidents. The survey indicates that some farmers have never heard about the incidents about quality and safety of agricultural products in China, which may affect their cognition of the serious con-sequences from non-standard pesticide application. Our results indicate the awareness of such incidents significantly affects the farmers' pesticide application behavior. Therefore, make incident information available to farmers can help improve farmers’ pesticide application behavior and agricultural sustainability.

Finally, the risk from agriculture should further be reduced. Farmers are facing relatively high risks from unstable yield and they need to bear most of the risks. Considering these risks can lead to non-standard pesticide application behavior, it is necessary to reduce the risk of agricultural production through agricultural insurance.”

10. The English grammar and style should be checked throughout the manuscript

Response: Thank you for pointing this out. We have checked the grammar and style throughout the paper.

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

The work is quite extensive. It is difficult to read because there is a lot of text and little graphical representation of the results.

The manuscript does not correspond to the content and scope of this journal. The survey studies presented in the manuscript are not described in detail in the methodology section. How many questions were there? What kind of questions?

The section on the description of the results is very hard to read. I would suggest showing the tables relating to the presentation of the results in the form of, for example, bar charts.

Overall, an interesting work but needs thorough re-editing. It is not printable in this form.

Best regards,

Author Response

We would like to thank the reviewers for their constructive comments and insightful feedback, which greatly helps improve our paper quality! We greatly appreciate the time taken to carefully go through each line of the paper and suggest the appropriate next steps. We have addressed the reviewers’ comments and our responses to the reviews’ comments are in blue font.

Reviewer 2

1. The work is quite extensive. It is difficult to read because there is a lot of text and little graphical representation of the results. The section on the description of the results is very hard to read. I would suggest showing the tables relating to the presentation of the results in the form of, for example, bar charts.

Response: We have deleted some contents not closely related to our main research goal. For example, consistency test of three types of dependent variables in the part of results and the factors of impacting farmer’s willing to join products’ quality and safety training in the part of discussion have been deleted. Additionally, we add some graphical representation of the results, just as shown in page 7 and page 8 in the new manuscript.

2. The manuscript does not correspond to the content and scope of this journal. The survey studies presented in the manuscript are not described in detail in the methodology section. How many questions were there? What kind of questions?

Response: This question has three parts and our responses to each part are listed below and we also clarified them in the paper:

1. a) This manuscript fits the scope of Agriculture. It is relative to the sections of “Agricultural Economics, Policies and Rural Management” and “Agricultural Product Quality and Safety” and it has cited several papers published in Agriculture.
2. b) The survey studies have been described in detail as follows:

“2.2.1. Questionnaire survey

The survey was conducted at random in the villages of Jiangsu Province of China in 2014. Before the survey, we conducted a preliminary investigation and investigators were trained to understand the questionnaire well. At last, 968 valid questionnaires are obtained.  Jiangsu Province is the largest producer of japonica rice in southern China. In this survey, the sample size of southern, Middle and Northern Jiangsu accounts for 22%, 24% and 54%, respectively. The average age of survey participants is 46.81 years old. Participants over 50 years old account for 36.47%, while participants younger than or equal to 35 years old account for 13.43% of the sample. The proportion of women is 46.80%, and male participants account for 53.20%. For education level, the percentage of farmers with junior middle school education is the highest, which accounts for 41.94% and followed by those with primary education, which accounts for 32.23%. Participants with high school, college or higher education level account for 14.15% and 11.67% of the sample, respectively. It shows that the education level is not high for the sample. From the perspective of annual income, participants with annual income level in the range of 10,000-30,000 RMB accounting for 45.66% of the sample, which is the largest proportion. Participants with annual income less than 10,000 RMB, in the range of 30,000-60,000 RMB and 60,000-100,000 RMB, and more than 100,000 RMB account for 20.87%, 23.24%, 6.92% and 3.31%, respectively. From the perspective of main source of household income, migrant work is the main source of income for most farmers (44.83%) and followed by farming (36.57%), and participants doing business other than farming account for 18.60%. It shows although migrant work is the main income source for most participants, agriculture is still the main source of income for some participants. The average of operation area for farming household is 9.01mu. However, the average operation scale will drop to 5.53mu if excluding large agricultural management households with farmland area exceeds 100mu, which indicates that the scale of farm-land operation for the sample is not large.”

1. c) There are twenty-six questions about farmer’s pesticide application behaviors excluding the basic information in our survey. Please see details as follows:

Survey on farmer’s pesticide application behaviors

Dear Respondents,

The main content of this survey is about pesticide application behavior. The questionnaire is anonymous, and any information collected about you will be kept strictly confidential and used only for academic research. Thank you for your cooperation!

1. Which is your choice of pesticide dosage when using pesticide?

• According to prescribe dosage of the instructions
• A little more than prescribed in the instructions
• Less than prescribed in the instructions
• More casual

1.1. The effect of standard pesticide application on yield

• Great influence
• Small influence
• Almost no influence

2. Will you choose the pesticide banned by the country when choosing the pesticide?

• (Probably) will, because I don't know what is banned pesticide in the country
• Yes, as long as no one caught it
• No

3. Some agricultural products are chemically treated to sell better and easier to sell at a good price, and if you can, will you do so?

• Yes, to increase income
• No
• I do not know

4. Genetically modified seeds (such as rice) generally have lodging resistance, pest resistance, yield increase effect, are you willing to choose such seeds at the same price?

• Yes
• No
• I do not know

5. When storing food for sale, do you spray drugs to prevent rats, pests, etc.?

• Yes
• No
• I do not know

6. Do you consider preharvest interval?

• No
• Yes

7. Have you ever raised livestock (poultry) for sale, etc.?

• Yes
• No

7.1 What do you do when livestock and poultry die of disease?

• Find a way to sell it
• Throw (buried).
• Other treatments

8. What do you think is the harm to people from a small amount of pesticide residues in agricultural products?

• The harm is great
• The hazard is average
• Not much harm
• Almost no harm

9. Do you know the impact of heavy metals on the quality and safety of agricultural products?

• Yes
• No

10. Is it okay to irrigate farmland with factory waste water?

• Yes
• No
• I do not know

11. Do you know the Law on the Quality and Safety of Agricultural products?

• Only heard of
• Ever read
• Never heard of

12. Which department regulates the quality of agricultural products?

• Agricultural department
• Business department
• Health department
• Food and Drug Supervision Department

13. Which is the strictest standard in China's agricultural certification?

• Pollution-free food
• Green
• Organic food
• I do not know

14. Do you know the traceability system for agricultural products?

• Yes
• Only heard of
• Never heard of it

15. As a consumer, you are willing to pay percent more than the original price for vegetables that are not sprayed with pesticides.
16. What do you think of the current overall food safety situation in China?

• Very good
• Good
• Average
• Poor
• Very poor

17. What do you think about the current quality and safety of agricultural products in China?

• Very good
• Good
• Average
• Poor
• Very poor

18. Compared with five years ago, you think China's food safety situation has changed to

• Get better
• No change
• Get worse

19. Do you think China's agricultural products are safer or that of developed countries?

• Developed countries
• Similar
• China

20. Where do you think the current safety problems of agricultural products mainly occur?

• Planting link
• Sales link
• Processing link

21. If there is free agricultural safety training, will you attend it?

• Yes
• No
• It depends

22. If you become aware of an offence in the cultivation and sale of agricultural products, you will

• Nothing to do with me
• Persuade him
• Report it to the government

23. Have you heard of quality and safety incidents of agricultural products such as "toxic cowpeas" and "poisonous ginger" caused by pesticide residue?

• Have heard of
• Never heard of

24. Has local training and publicity been carried out on the quality and safe planting of agricultural products?

• Hardly
• Occasionally
• Regularly

25. Whether there is local supervision on the quality and safety of agricultural products?

• Hardly any
• Occasionally
• Often

26. What do you think should be done to improve the quality and safety of agricultural products?

• Strengthen supervision
• Strengthen knowledge training
• Price subsidy

3. 3. Overall, an interesting work but needs thorough re-editing.

Response: Thank you for your comments. Correction has been made. Please see the content in blue font in our new manuscript.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks for the improvements.

The manuscript is suitable for publication.

Best Regards

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

The authors of the manuscript significantly improved the text of the paper.  This facilitates a better understanding of the manuscript.
However, I believe that many of the results presented in the tables could be shown in a graph.  I thank the authors for their contributions to the improvement of the manuscript. In my opinion the article to be published in this format.

Best regards,

MJ