Abstract: Inter-governmental cooperation,serving as an important phenomenon in the public administration in China, has changed, to a certain extent,the competition oriented relationship between local governments. Two local governments with different performance objectives but a common target to achieve a win-win results on food safety and poverty alleviation, cooperate with models, such as comprehensive cooperation, information-based cooperation, entity-based cooperation and consumption cooperation, different in degree of food supervision based on different combinations of supervisors and supervision tools.This paper, based on the analysis of “cost-benefit”, finds that the historical cooperative relationship and the real financial connection produce the direct and indirect costs of cooperation, while the acquisition of the model title and the occurrence of negative events convey different symbols changing the income expectation of the cooperation. Changes of such sort at length decide the possibility and degree of their cooperation. The research on the motivation of local government cooperation on supervision provides marginal contribution for the research on the behavior trend of local government in China under the pressure system, and offers a perspective for cooperation between China’s east and west regions on the next stage of rural revitalization.

Key words: food safety supervision, cross-regional inter-governmental cooperation, cost-benefit, rural revitalization, governance modernization