ABSTRACT
The previous chapters have set out the current state of play in benchmarking in farming and food. There are numerous mass participation benchmark systems in developed countries, and small group benchmarking practices established in New Zealand, Australia, the UK and more recently Canada. Environmental benchmarking is more difficult to locate – there are standards, indices and targets but the question is one of process: are they actually used in benchmarking for best practice? There is little evidence of this happening on a consistent basis, despite the number of well-developed and resourced initiatives in existence. In the food supply chain, management accounting practices are less advanced than might be supposed (Luther and Abdel-Kader, 2006), but there are very sophisticated data capture systems in the form of EPOS (electronic point of sale), ECR (efficient customer response) and RFID (radio frequency identification) that could feed into benchmarking for best practice systems.
