STRATEGIC OVERVIEW
Director-General's Introduction
The SOI sits at the heart of our planning and organisational development processes.
It describes MAF's role and ambitions, summarises the global and domestic challenges shaping our operating environment, outlines our contributions to the Government's goals, and demonstrates how we manage our resources and measure our performance in delivering on our expanding mandate.
MAF's SOI is the outline of what impact we aim to have over a three to five year period. It is our statement of what we intend should be different as a result of our efforts, and what precise measures we intend to use to measure the impact we are having. The SOI is, in other words, our commitment to Ministers, taxpayers and stakeholders to do more than simply keep the machine ticking over. It is intended to be ambitious and action-oriented. To be successful, it must be well aligned with the expectations and needs of our stakeholders.
Within the senior team at MAF, we use the catch cry “Putting MAF back at the top tables”. We believe the organisation has a vital role to play and the people of New Zealand will be best served by a MAF that is able to produce top quality policy analysis and is influential in advocacy derived from that analysis. To be successful, we must also be strong and rigorous in our regulatory philosophy and innovative, effective and efficient in our service delivery functions. Since a large part of our revenue is gathered from non-government sources, we face the added disciplines associated with justifying the cost of our services to companies and individuals we work with in regulatory and service delivery roles.
While we operate under a variety of different brands, and have a diverse range of policy, regulatory and service delivery roles, there is a clear and important set of common drivers to MAF's work. At heart, those common drivers centre on biological processes and the business of shifting biological risks safely across international borders. Doing that well, both inwards as imports and outwards as exports, by improving the efficiency with which trade in risk products is transacted safely is the big contribution we can make to the wellbeing of New Zealanders.
We describe ourselves as a sustainable development agency. The term “sustainable development” is heavily used in general policy discussion these days, but generally under-defined and not well understood. To us, and at its simplest, sustainable development incorporates two parallel and intertwined themes. The first is the economic growth and innovation imperative to our work - “development”. Without that, we cannot provide the living standards, the education, health care, recreation, security and infrastructure of a first class nation.
The second theme - “sustainable” - relates to an imperative that has been present for a long time, but has been slower to attract due attention - that of ensuring our production processes recognise and capture the full range of impacts they create. This is especially important with regard to the longer term environmental consequences of the production process and is particularly relevant to agricultural process, the animal welfare consequences of the production, processing and the distribution systems employed.
We believe these two themes are intertwined because we see New Zealand's success on the development side as being conditional on satisfying sustainability dimensions. Sustainability is not merely a constraint on economic growth, it is a contributor and, done effectively, has the potential to be an important, differentiating factor, enhancing New Zealand's future economic success.
This SOI outlines how we intend to use the resources available to MAF to make the difference we think will best serve the people of New Zealand.
M A Sherwin
Director-General
Contact for Enquiries
Strategy and Performance Group
Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry
Pastoral House
25 The Terrace
PO Box 2526, Wellington
Tel: +64 4 894 0100
Fax: +64 4 894 0738
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