Abstract: This paper aims to discuss the factors that affect the effectiveness of China’s quality and safety traceability system for edible agricultural products in order to provide scientific guidance for the implementation of the system. Based on integration of eight industry experts’ opinions by the Delphi method, the grey decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (Grey-DEMATEL) method combined with fuzzy interpretive structural modeling (FISM) was adopted to analyze the effectiveness of the multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) model for the agricultural product traceability system, and 18 factors influencing the current agricultural product traceability system were evaluated in four main dimensions. The results showed that: 1) the factors comprised a three-layer hierarchical structure including the fundamental, intermediate and apparent layers; 2) the current principal supervisory responsibility, consumer awareness about agricultural products traceability and the implementability of the traceability system were the fundamental factors affecting the effectiveness of the agricultural product traceability system; 3) consumer willingness to trace agricultural products, consumer satisfaction with agricultural products traceability, information disclosure and sharing capability, and emergency response capability are the apparent factors that affect the effectiveness of the traceability system; 4) Emergency handling capability, information disclosure and sharing capability are the key success factors for the effectiveness of the traceability system. Based on these results, we suggested that: 1) for the construction of efficiency evaluation indicators, attention should be paid to the quantification and weighting of apparent and fundamental factors in order to better reflect the current agricultural products traceability system and its effectiveness; 2) for efficiency improvement, appearance factors should be improved in a positive feedback manner by improving fundamental factors, releasing old efficiency and focusing on key success factors and efficiency construction, thereby in a negative feedback manner providing new efficiency for the system, and promoting the achievement of the efficiency goal of the current agricultural product traceability system.

Key words: edible agricultural products; traceability system; efficiency