8.7 Current EMS/QMS Performance with respect to Policy Goals
Existing EMS/QMS systems are important in terms of their influence on products and their influence on farms, orchards, and surrounding areas of air, land and water. These systems impact both the farmers and market chain who use them, and a proportion of market participants who do not use them, but learn by observing the actions of others and modifying their own systems. The existing systems have benefit in their own right and as research laboratories. The existing systems are important for environmental agencies (particularly Regional Councils) as they are a potential means of achieving regional goals and compliance.
The performance of the case study EMS/QMS to date in terms of policy goals is reported in Table 6. It appears that these systems function in an educational manner to improve the management and decision making of individual operators. As such they are making a significant contribution at the margin to the achievement of policy goals. It is clear that there are differences in potential effectiveness in the use of the instruments to achieve government's two principle policy goals. These systems by themselves will only directly influence a proportion of farms and firms. This probably does not matter with respect to competitiveness because commercial pressure will drive firms to improve and the successful will thrive and the non-successful will not. However, in terms of environmental outcomes government agencies are concerned about aggregate performance. For instance they are concerned about all the fertiliser runoff from all the farms in a catchment and they are concerned about the spray drift from all the orchards in a district. Hence it is important to find ways to expand the impact of EMS/QMS systems or else there is the need to rely on alternative mechanisms.
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