Importance of Pesticide Safety Management and Perceived Share of Rural Development Administration Technical Support among Sampled Kimchi Cabbage Farms Exporting to Taiwan and Strawberry Farms Exporting to Hong Kong
This study compared perceived importance of production technology and pesticide safety management f actors and d erived a measure of Rural D evelopment A dministration (RDA)- related technical support in two purposively sampled groups: kimchi cabbage farms exporting to Taiwan and strawberry farms exporting to H ong Kong. De- identified r esponses f rom 87 f arms ( 46 k imchi cabbage and 41 strawberry farms) were reanalyzed. Respondents separately allocated 100% among four production technology factors and among three pesticide safety management factors. Because these constant-sum responses were compositional data, centered log-ratio transformation and PERMANOVA based on Aitchison distance were applied with nonparametric tests and bootstrap intervals. The perceived RDA technical-support share was defined as the mean pesticide-importance share multiplied by the sum of the mean shares for pesticide safe-use guidelines and administrative and training support, divided by 100. These components were grouped as RDA-related because the survey was linked to RDA export pesticide safety guidance. The measure is study-specific and not a validated performance or economic contribution metric. Production technology composition differed between samples (pseudo-F = 7.738, p<0.001), and pesticide importance was higher in the Taiwan-export kimchi cabbage sample (27.6% vs. 18.2%; Holm-adjusted p<0.001). No significant difference in pesticide safety management composition was detected (p = 0.478); farmer awareness and effort had the largest mean shares in both samples (41.4% and 39.1%). The perceived RDA technical-support shares were 16.18% (bootstrap 95% interval, 14.27–18.35) and 11.06% (9.08–13.30), respectively, a difference of 5.12 percentage points (2.18–8.12). Because crop type, export destination, survey location, survey period, and participating organization were completely confounded and purposive sampling was used, results should be interpreted as exploratory descriptions of the two samples, not as crop, destination, causal policy effects, or population parameters.