ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to identify a number of areas of performance measurement that have been labelled as environmental or sustainable in farming and food, and to assess whether this activity could be construed as benchmarking, or developed into benchmarking. It covers some basic principles of how environmental and sustainable policy has been worked into legislation, through nutrient budgeting, externalities and agri-environment schemes, and as these schemes have achieved success in changing farm practices, the potential of such schemes to be incorporated into benchmarking activities at farm level is evaluated. The chapter then illustrates how issues of environment and sustainability have been tackled in the agri-food industry. Agri-environmental schemes were introduced by governments in European countries in the 1980s. The natural foci for this activity are agriculture, being fundamentally land-based, and the food industries, which incorporate many features other than food production that impact on land through packaging and transport.
