Land and Water Link

Issue No. 12, May 2002

Linking Agriculture, Environment and Economy Around the world, agricultural and rural industries are seizing the initiative to adopt voluntary (non-legislated) approaches to environmental management, as well as to quality assurance, food safety and animal welfare. As uptake of these voluntary environmental management arrangements (VEMAs) gathers momentum, there are implications for the future of Australian agricultural and rural industries.

To help shape Australian participation in this area, a joint project funded by Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation (RIRDC) and CSIRO has provided a report that allows stakeholders to assess the design features, implications and merits of various models – VEMAs: Designing voluntary environmental management arrangements to improve natural resource management in agriculture and allied rural industries.

Dr Thea Mech, resource economist and co-author, explains the significance of VEMAs and their potential promise for addressing complex environmental and natural resource management (NRM) issues in agriculture.

'VEMAs are indicative of the paradigm shift in how NRM and environmental protection are being thought about and approached. What we are seeing is a search for new management tools and policy instruments that represent a departure from orthodox government programs and regulation. The new agenda stresses industry's potential to develop its own solutions.'

'VEMA' is an umbrella term embracing many very different types of arrangements including environmental management systems, as well as various production protocols that may be part of environmental certification schemes and environmental labeling initiatives.

Dr Mech explains, 'As their name implies, all VEMAs share two common features: they are concerned with environmental management, and they are undertaken voluntarily. While VEMAs are 'voluntary' in the sense that participation in them is not prescribed by law, it is critical for the Australian agricultural industry to realise that their uptake including verifiable compliance against specific standards may increasingly become a precondition of entry to some trade markets.'

Ultimately, the success of VEMAs depends upon how industry and business embraces them. To ensure the environmental and commercial sustainability of agricultural and rural industries, perhaps the most important tasks and challenges ahead involve identifying the nature of the optimum mix of voluntary and formal approaches to environmental management, and creating an enabling environment for industry and business to participate.

Dr Mech cautions, 'Although VEMAs hold enormous promise as a possible means of addressing complex environmental and NRM issues, it would be premature to view VEMAs as an environmental management panacea. An optimum mix of formal government and voluntary industry and communityled approaches is likely to result in the best environmental, marketplace and social outcomes.'

The CSIRO Land and Water project team is now working on five RIRDC Briefing Papers, each addressing different aspects of improving environmental management in agriculture through voluntary means. Greater understanding of four interconnected areas is needed to link demonstrable environmental improvement with marketplace benefits.

These areas cover the design of environmental standards and guidelines for agriculture and rural industries, their incorporation into credible and feasible environmental labeling and certification schemes, the greening of agrifood supply chains, and the growing importance of 'the environment' in emerging international trade policy with consequent implications for Australian agriculture.

The CSIRO team is also exploring the relationships, synergies and tensions between voluntary, regulatory and market-based approaches to environmental management.

The report on VEMAs, written by Thea Mech and Mike Young, is available on the RIRDC website.

For further information:

Contact

Dr Thea Mech
Ph: 08 8303 8663