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DOI: 10.14738/aivp.92.9992
Publication Date: 25th April, 2021
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/aivp.92.9992
A System Dynamics Approach for Modeling a Food safety
incident: Borax incident for WDL Flour Company
1, 2 Lang Liang
1 School of Management, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China
2 School of Management, Henan University of Technology, Zhengzhou 450001, China
ABSTRACT
With the rapid increase of food supply, food safety incidents occur frequently.
Therefore, how to prevent food safety incident and improve food safety
management have become an open issue. In this paper, a particular food safety
incident, that is, Borax incident for WDL Flour Company, is analyzed using system
dynamics approach for providing guidance for food safety management, which
usually involves multiple organizations and factors. To do this, a system dynamics
(SD) model including a two-way communication mechanism between five
organizations is established to simulate the process of the incident and the response
of the company. The results show that the present SD model is effective to simulate
the actual process of the food safety incident. Further, to explore the role of two-way
communication in food safety incident control, five cases that respond to the process
of two-way communication are assumed and the corresponding SD models to the
five cases are established. It is revealed that the two-way communication between
the five organizations plays an important role in food safety incident management,
and its influence on food safety is systematic and nonlinear.
Keywords: Food safety incident; Risk management; Communication; System
dynamics.
INTRODUCTION
Food safety is becoming an increasingly prominent issue in China. A series of food
safety incidents caused by the sale of melamine-tainted baby milk formula, gutter
cooking oil, Borax-tainted flour and clenbuterol-tainted pork seriously increase
public concern to the food safety and also weaken the public confidence in the
government’s ability to regulate food industries. As a result, the question of "what
else can we eat" has been raised naturally.
The causes of food safety incidents are manifold. For example, the improper use of
new food processing technologies such as crop and animal transgenic technologies
in food production may cause food acceptance crisis [1-3]. The chemical, microbial
or physical contamination of food may lead to public health crisis [4, 5]. The simple
and unopen management by the government to the food safety incident may cause
public confidence crisis [6]. So far, a lot of research on food safety have been
conducted. Frewer et al [7] systematically reviewed 54 published papers and
studied the extent that the current theoretical framework is applied in food risk or
benefit communication and the effects of food risk or benefit communication on
consumption behavior. Margôt Kuttschreuter [8] studied the risk of application of
nanotechnology in food area and evaluated the factors of online information sharing
on food risk. Yang et al. [9] established the Bayesian model to assess the overall food
quality and safety status and to evaluate the qualified rate of food in China market.
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Liang, L. (2021). A System Dynamics Approach for Modeling a Food safety incident: Borax incident for WDL Flour
Company. European Journal of Applied Sciences, 9(2). 265-282.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/aivp.92.9992
The model can also be used to assess product quality and reduce the likelihood of
food incident. Ha et al. [10] investigated the information linkages among food
incidents, institutional trust, and risk perception and found that food incident
information will result in a low level of institutional trust. Nayak and Waterson [11]
summarized the impact of globalization on food safety and emphasized the
importance to understand the interactions among different components in the
global food safety system. Furthermore, Wang et al. [12] used descriptive statistics
and factor analysis to analyze the influencing factors of food safety and summarized
four main factors influencing food safety. Based on the food safety incidents that
have occurred in China, Ma et al. [13] pointed out the main risk factors and
responsible organizations of food safety. Zhang [14] analyzed the difficulties and
causes of frequent food safety incidents in China and pointed out that the food safety
issues are highly complex.
Because the occurrence and development of food safety incidents is a time-related
systemic problem, using system dynamics (SD) method for studying food safety
issue is advantageous. For example, in order to assess the policy of reducing energy
consumption of food industry in United States, Xu et al. developed a SD model on
energy consumption in the food industry, which can be used to predict food energy
consumption in United States for more than 50 years and evaluate the effect of
energy-saving policies in food industries in United States [15]. Additionally, a SD
model of sustainable food supply in Indonesia was established by Findiastuti et al.
[16]. The model containing economic, environmental and social elements and their
relationship was used to analyze the food supply in Indonesia systematically and
quantitatively. As a result, the policy of sustainable development in Indonesia was
proposed. Mu et al. [17] established the SD model of the food safety culture influence
mechanism of the enterprise. Based on the simulation, some relevant suggestions of
promoting the development of food safety culture in enterprises and reducing the
frequency of food safety incidents were put forward. All these studies indicate that
the SD method is effective for modeling a complex system quantitatively. However,
the study of food safety incidents using the SD method has not been reported, to the
author’s best knowledge. Because China's organizations related to food safety
mainly include food enterprises, public, government, scientific research institutions
and the media [18, 19], the communication between them forms a complex dynamic
system. In this study, a flour incident from Chinese flour processing company is
analyzed and the corresponding SD model, which can reflect the two-way
communication, is established to simulate the process of the incident and the normal
response of the company (assuming that the incident did not occur). The simulation
results agree well with the actual situation and process of this food safety incident.
At the same time, the characteristics of two-way communication influence on food
safety incident are further studied by simulating five hypothetical situations that can
reflect the effect of two-way communication.
INCIDENT DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS
In this section, the incident of flour safety from Wudley Company is described [20]
and then it is analyzed from the different viewpoints.
Incident Background And Process
Wudley Company (WDC) is a famous flour enterprise in China. It has 14 subsidiaries
in six provinces and has a daily wheat processing capacity of 20,000 tons. It has won
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European Journal of Applied Sciences, Volume 9 No. 2, April 2021
Services for Science and Education, United Kingdom
the title of "National key leading Enterprises of Agricultural industrialization",
"National Standardization good behavior Enterprise" and "Top 100 Enterprises of
China's Food Industry" and other honorary titles.
The flour safety incident of WDC occurred in 2012. On September 13, the Public
Security Bureau of Cangzhou city (PSBC) issued a document which points out that
according to the test results, the content of borax in three flour samples of WDC were
4.33mg, 4.56mg, and 4.66mg per kilogram, respectively. So, on September 14, Hebei
Provincial Bureau of Industry and Commerce (HPBIC) issued an official document
of "an emergency notice on the inspection of the Wudley flour market". This
document was forwarded within the government’s system, and simultaneously,
HPBIC demanded that production and sale of flour containing borax must be
immediately stopped.
On September 19, the government website of Handan city released the information
of "Industry and commerce department quickly checked the problem of unqualified
flour". On September 20, Caixin website released a news of "The country's first- selling flour enterprises was checked due to adding carcinogen borax to flour." On
the same day, however, the website of WDC published an information of “To date,
WDC has not received any inspection report and written notice of which their flour
is unqualified.” On September 22, WDC held a news conference to declare the
checking results of 42 flour samples which were performed by a third-party
organization and pointed out that no any carcinogenic borax was found in WDC flour
product. Because the checking results were published by the company itself, and
more importantly, the results are not from the official check, so the impact of the
flour safety risk is still expanding. By September 24, about 100000 related
information has been found through searching in Baidu using words "Wudley, flour,
borax". By September 26, after confirmation by an authoritative technical
department that the allowable content of borax in flour product is 16.5%, Hebei
Province convoked news release conference and announced that according to the
inspection results of the authoritative inspection organizations and the
communication with the relevant departments, WDC did not illegally add borax in
the flour production process. On October 2, the "Truth investigation" program of
Oriental time and Space reported on the practical circumstances of the incident, and
illustrated that WDC didn't artificially add borax to the flour. Thereafter, this fake
flour safety incident was disappeared.
Analysis Of Incident
The analysis of such incident is made as follows. The incident was first caused by the
local public security department. In the multi-sector and segmented food safety
management model, mainly due to the inadequate communication between
management organizations, lack of experience and capacity for the enterprises to
respond to the crisis, and inadequate government enforcement, the incidents that
should been avoided was happened indeed.
The WDC lacks the capacity and experience to deal with major crises and did not
communicate with management organization, such as government, media and
research institutions and so on, to obtain evidence and solutions that the flour is
qualified. The WDC just declared itself that their flour is qualified. This subjective