Rural Affairs and Environment Committee, 09 Sep 2008

Meeting date: Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Official Report 382KB pdf

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Food Policy

I ask again that all mobile phones, pagers and so on be switched off or, at least, be put in flight mode. They interfere with the sound system even when they accept things when they are on vibrate or silent, so I am afraid that that is not an option. Thank you for switching them off.

The plan is to finish this session around 3.40, so we have quite a lot of time. Obviously, if the whole thing dries up and everybody is struck dumb earlier, we will finish earlier. However, that is the available envelope, so nobody needs to feel under an enormous amount of pressure.

I invite each witness to say who they are, why they are here, what they represent and to flag up one aspect that they want us to take away from today.

Good afternoon. I have worked on food policy in 20 to 30 countries around the world with people in organisations such as the United Nations, the World Bank and the European Community. What I want members to take away is the fact that one of the official publications that I have seen on food policy in Scotland ranks with the worst document on food policy that I have seen anywhere in the world. I appeal to the committee to get in a world-class team of food policy experts to do the job effectively. Before you ask, I am not looking for a job, but I will happily advise on how to recruit such people.

I am the food and agricultural policy officer for WWF Scotland, which is part of a global environmental organisation. The key message for us is that the biggest challenge and the biggest threat to long-term food security in Scotland is the sustainability of the food that Scotland produces and consumes, not least in terms of climate change. Food is a good example of why the proposed climate change bill needs to measure not just CO2 but a range of greenhouse gases, and to address not only the problem of emissions from our food production but the problem of consumption emissions from our consumption of food. As we heard this morning, we import a large amount of food, so what we do in Scotland is not the whole picture in terms of climate and food.

I am the director of the Soil Association Scotland, which is the devolved office of the Soil Association, the UK body that focuses on sustainable food and farming. We are perhaps especially known for our concentration on organic food, but we are interested in all sustainable food and regard organic food and farming as exemplars of, but not the only answer to, sustainability in our food supplies. If I had one point to make, it would be to ask you, please, not to be seduced by technological resolutions or technofixes—I refer in particular to biofuels and genetically modified organisms.

I am head of the land economy and environment research group in the Scottish Agricultural College. The one thing that we want to put forward is the need for sustainable farming systems in Scotland that allow farmers to be technically efficient while protecting our environment and enhancing our rural economies.

Good afternoon. I am the head of Oxfam Scotland. My understanding is that I was invited to bring an international perspective to the discussion. There is no doubt that food security is not an issue just for Scotland, but is a global issue. For the many hundreds of thousands of people with whom we work around the world, food security and rising food prices are not simply about long-term sustainability—they are matters of life and death.

The perspective that I would like the committee to take away from the meeting is to do with the fact that we are intrinsically linked in a global food system. There are some key issues that impact on the poorest people in the world; those people will be my focus as we consider food security globally. The biggest gap in funding is a 20-year lack of investment in agriculture, particularly in rural small-scale agriculture, which is making many countries in the world desperately food-insecure.

I am from the Macaulay Institute in Aberdeen, which is the main research provider to the Scottish Government. I have worked in food and rural development issues for many years.

My key question is how the committee can better support the development of an economically vibrant but environmentally sustainable agri-food complex in Scotland.

I am a chef and restaurateur. I have a business at Gleneagles hotel. I represent the fun aspect of food—food as pleasure. I would like the committee's work to result in better collaboration between food producers, hotels, restaurants, businesses and local authorities.

That is useful. It is interesting that we have witnesses from a number of different areas, some of which might counterpoint others.

Thank you all for coming. As with the previous panel, we will begin by discussing the impact of local food on the Scottish food scene. As Oxfam's representative, Judith Robertson might not wish to comment, but she should feel free to comment on any issues that arise. I appreciate that we are not talking about the international dimension of local food, but the marketing and provenance of such food, and its importance or otherwise in a world that grows hungrier daily. The Oxfam perspective might be that rather than worry about the quality of food that is available, we should worry about whether food will be available at all. I am interested to hear everyone's views.

We face a challenge in that if we choose local food over food from elsewhere, that will have an impact internationally. In choosing local food, will we be doing the right thing? Who would like to kick off? Hugh Raven raised his eyebrows. I warn witnesses that the meeting will be a bit like an auction—if you waggle your pen, raise an eyebrow or look askance, I am liable to pounce on you. If you do not want to be drawn into the discussion, you must sit very still.

I welcome the opportunity to comment on local food, which we in the Soil Association are keen to promote. I will make some cautionary suggestions in response to Mr Scott.

Although local food has a great deal to offer—I will elaborate on that theme shortly—it is useful to draw into the conversation the term "food miles", which has a great deal of resonance these days. The term is particularly close to my heart, given that I claim—but get no credit for—co-authorship of it. The man whom the etymological dictionaries credit with having invented it is Tim Lang, but I worked with him as his right-hard person when he devised it and edited the first food miles report.

Food that is low in food miles has—wrongly, in my view—become a proxy for sustainable food. The concept of food miles is extremely effective as a way of sensitising public opinion to the issues of food transportation and the potential benefits of local food, but it is misleading to regard it as the next best thing to, or an equivalent of, sustainable food, for reasons on which I am sure Judith Robertson could elaborate more effectively than I can.

Reducing food miles does not always mean increasing sustainable food, and locally produced food can sometimes be extremely damaging. One of the leading advocates of local food in the district in which I live—Lochaber—is in fact a highly intensive battery chicken producer, about whose production there is nothing sustainable whatsoever. Nonetheless, it is local to the people in that area.

I have a couple of other quick comments. There are strong benefits from supporting a local food economy. The capacity to produce a variety of crops in as many areas of Scotland as possible—by maintaining a local food economy, the diversity of production and agricultural land in a condition such that it can be turned to a variety of production systems—is helpful from the point of view of both food security and sustainable development.

There is also a strong educational element in local food of allowing the producer and consumer to be as close together in the supply chain as possible. In other words, there can be direct feedback from the consumer about the food attributes that they want, which will enable a much better understanding among producers of how they can add value and address local needs. There are educational and sustainable development benefits through reducing transport and retaining agricultural land in a condition that is fit to supply local markets.

Several points came out strongly this morning. Food production is 75 per cent fossil fuels—in the form of fertiliser and fuel—and the price of fossil fuels has shot up. At the same time, we are struck by global warming and are feeding a massive world population. Those are the fundamental problems that we will face in the next five to 10 years. All the world markets that we have been used to will cease to apply, and all the production functions and the costs of production of various crops will cease to apply. We must tackle that situation—doing so will solve the problems.

One problem is that the Scottish Parliament does not have the capacity to tackle the cost of a barrel of oil. We can discuss the tools that are available to us.

I will ask Bill Slee to speak. Then I want to challenge Andrew Fairlie about how easy he finds it to source food locally or, if he does not source local food, why not.

Local food is an important strand in the development of Scottish food policy, although I would tend to use the word "regional" rather than local. In other words, we may want to think in terms of Grampian and the Highlands, rather than—

I think that by local we have generally meant Scotland-wide.

My point is that local can be thought of on different scales.

In general, a stronger local food sector is good for rural development. It is particularly good when it can connect to tourism, which is the biggest industry in many parts of rural Scotland. Andrew Fairlie can comment on that.

Hugh Raven's point about reconnecting producers and consumers is important for the local food sector in building understanding, and it is good for sustainability. The point about road miles is well taken: having few road miles on intensively heated Scottish tomatoes is not necessarily good for sustainability.

We must recognise that the local food sector will be quite small, especially in Orkney, Caithness, Dumfries and Galloway and Grampian, so the export market for high-quality Scottish food will be vital to the overall wellbeing of the rural sector. Therefore, we should support the local food sector and nurture its growth, but we should not regard it as the answer to rural development problems. The mainstream food sector will also be very important.

Okay. Andrew Fairlie?

What do you want to know? I source locally as much as I can, although doing so is much more difficult than it would seem. Food from within a 30-mile radius is regarded as local, but given the level of restaurant that I run, to me as a chef local produce means Scottish produce. It is not possible to sustain my restaurant using only produce that is available in and around Perthshire. My job is to source the best ingredients I can get. Nine times out of 10 they are Scottish, but there are certain things that we cannot source in Scotland—poultry, for one, is pretty grim.

Is that because the kind of poultry that you want to source is not available? Obviously, there is any amount of battery farming going on in Scotland, but that is not what you are interested in.

That is right. What is hugely important to me as a chef is the quality of the produce, its sustainability and so on: we look for a range of things in a product. I have not found a supplier here who can give us the quality of poultry that I can buy in France.

You said that sustainability is one of the issues that you take on board. How does your restaurant measure sustainability?

How do we measure sustainability?

Yes. If you account for sustainability in the produce you buy, how do you measure that and decide whether, from the restaurant's perspective, products are more or less sustainable?

An example, from the restaurant perspective, is that I will not buy dredged scallops—I buy only hand-dived scallops. We pay a lot more for them and we have to pass on the cost, but I will not accept dredged scallops. We do not buy a number of goods because ethically they are not good. We try as much as we can to be sustainable.

Adam Harrison and I talked about the issue prior to the meeting. As one might expect, I would like to give perhaps not an alternative side to the argument on food miles but to say that one of the key issues around food miles is that consumption patterns in Scotland's economy would have a global impact if we stopped importing certain foods that are produced in developing countries. Although we acknowledge the carbon-emissions impact of transporting food long distances, there is sometimes a miscalculation in respect of emissions around whether it is more effective to transport it and produce it elsewhere. Inevitably, I will raise the issue of the impact on developing countries' economies of curtailing those productive sources and stopping those exports. That does not mean to say that Oxfam or I would say that we should continue to carry on exporting food in those programmes.

Consideration of only food as the primary issue will lead to a certain conclusion, but if you look at the structure of economies and the way in which food systems integrate with economic systems globally, there is a slightly different story. Developing countries are forced into a position in which exporting primary commodities is their principal source of foreign income, which is not sustainable on a national economic level. Our intention and hope would be that developed countries' policies would take into account their impact on developing countries, not in order to exclude change but to ensure that change processes are fair and equitable, do not cause more poverty, do not put people further into vulnerable situations but support them to get out of them, and do not build into economic structures and trade policies barriers, tariffs and so on that inhibit the potential for developing countries to get out of the poverty traps in which they find themselves.

I agree with many of the other witnesses that there are good cultural, economic and social reasons to support local food, but I also agree with Hugh Raven that the environmental reason to do so is not always so clear. Half the greenhouse gas emissions from food come from the primary production process—the farming side. In all but a few cases, the emissions that are due to transport are a small part of the total.

The key is to examine the whole production cycle and work out where the emissions are. An interesting way to look at the issue is to think about striving for seasonality rather than locality. Wherever it happens in the world, the production of fruit and vegetables out of season will be expensive to the climate; it does not make sense to produce them out of season. I would be interested to explore where the balance of responsibility lies between retailers and consumers on that. On one side, the retailers will say that they make out-of-season strawberries available because the customer wants them, but the customer also goes into the shop and buys them because they are available. We need to try to crack that egg and work out how we can move back to thinking much more sustainably and holistically about the food that people consume.

That is quite a challenge against the backdrop of rising food prices. For many people who are trying to feed a family week to week, the most important thing is the price of the food on the shelf, not where it comes from or how it was produced. We would be fooling ourselves if we did not accept that that was the reality in most food purchasing. What impact does what you are talking about have on that?

One reason why there is so much relatively cheap food on the shelves is that the real costs are not accounted for in the price the consumer pays. I am talking about the climate impacts, the water pollution impacts and the fact that horticulture—

So you think that food should be even more expensive.

There are many arguments to say that we ought to reflect the real cost of our food—the real cost of our consumption—in what we spend on it.

Should that happen even if people go hungry?

It is not a matter of people going hungry, but of society as a whole accounting for the costs.

People will be hungry anyway and millions of them will die.

They are already dying.

People are not yet dying in the streets of Edinburgh or Glasgow for want of food.

The convener made the point that the Scottish Parliament cannot do much about the world oil price, but we must know what impact it will have on Scottish agriculture. It will affect what crops every farmer chooses to produce, so it will affect everybody, but we do not know what is happening. Is Bill Slee getting 30 per cent of his research budget to examine the effects of global warming?

Climate change is a major cross-cutting theme across all the research in our research programme, which is shared with the Scottish Agricultural College and other organisations. We have invested significantly in that work and are investing more all the time in work by researchers from environmental psychologists through to crop scientists, so we are taking a broad-ranging look at climate change.

In general, the evidence is that eastern Scotland in particular will probably have enhanced growing conditions, although it will perhaps also have a longer soil-moisture deficit in the summer. Although many other parts of the world could suffer more adverse responses to climate change, eastern Scotland might be relatively advantaged. Western Scotland could have wetter summers and wetter winters. For those of you who are from or represent the west, that is hard luck but, in Alford in Aberdeenshire, I will be relatively okay.

There is continuing research, and I believe that more effort will be expended in the future, with the Government in Scotland investing in that research.

Do you have as much money as you feel you need?

Regardless of what policy area one is in, the answer to that question is always no—nobody ever has enough money for what they want to do, so we will take it that Professor Slee would like more money.

Yes. However, at the margins, we are investing a lot more research time in that topic. I am sure that my SAC colleagues would say the same. We consider it to be a priority.

You might have heard James Withers from the NFUS say, in a startling departure from the norm—for which I commend him—that it is more about spending the money in a better and more targeted way than it is about getting more money. Are there areas where better targeted spending might be an issue?

That issue always exists. There are always path dependencies. There is a history of where we have come from in the research that we have done, and emergent issues need more resources, so of course the issue applies—

From your perspective, what are the key research areas? Peter Bowbrick believes that the impact of climate change is key.

Fuel is also key.

The most important thing is for Scotland to have a competitive agri-food system and to maintain it sustainably into the future.

Can you expand on that? It is not clear to me.

If we look back over our shoulders at the past 10 years of Scottish agricultural performance, farm incomes have been desperately compromised. A number of major crises were wrought as a result of BSE and foot and mouth disease, which dramatically interrupted trade in livestock. Arable farmers' incomes were also desperately low three or four years ago. In the past 18 months, there has been a turnaround in fortunes, but it is not complete and it has not happened throughout the industry. The average age of farmers is increasing because many young people do not want to enter the industry.

We could say that the industry has been hanging on by its fingernails, but it is looking forward to slightly better times as a result of increased global demand, biofuels and other factors that are fairly well documented. However, there are still some major issues of sustainability in Scottish agriculture, such as the need for small abattoirs to support local development. There are also issues of overcapacity in the abattoir sector overall. A number of issues in the agri-food complex need to be addressed.

There is a desperate need for a dynamic and responsive industry throughout the food supply chain that can deliver to local and regional development and deliver competitively into export markets, which will largely remain open. In global political discourse, there is a move towards freer trade. We live within that framework, and Scotland needs to be competitive within it.

You said that there is overcapacity in abattoirs as well as a need for more small abattoirs. Will you expand on that? If there is overcapacity, what is the problem?

The large-scale meat processing sector deals predominantly with export from regions. There is an issue in island economies, where livestock must be transported long distances and then returned. Mull has a small co-operatively owned abattoir and Islay has just developed one. They are important because people are trying to develop the local sectors, and they are important for animal welfare reasons. However, because of regulation and costs, they tend not to be competitive. Because Orkney is larger, it has a larger and more competitive abattoir that can compete more widely and effectively.

Bill Slee picked up on some of the points that I was going to raise, but I return to the barriers to supply of local food. You mentioned abattoirs, about which we heard this morning. Before we came into the room, Andrew Fairlie was talking about getting access to lobsters and so on, and in his opening remarks he mentioned better connections between restaurants and suppliers. What are the impediments to that? What is the dynamic that is not working? Are there other obvious barriers to the market for local food? As Bill Slee said, the context is that local food markets are a part of Scotland's future.

Are you bouncing the question back to Andrew Fairlie, Bill Slee or both?

It is for both, and for the others.

Education is an important factor. Farmers now realise that they have to work in a different way. One barrier that prevents me from buying local produce is that, when I try to deal directly with farmers, they have no concept of how my business operates. On the other side, chefs have no concept of how agriculture operates. For us to work together, we need joined-up thinking in the middle. Chefs need to understand the farming side and farmers need to understand our side.

On a number of occasions, local producers have contacted me to say that they have, for example, some fantastic pork. When they bring it in, we taste it and find that it is fantastic. I commit myself to putting it on the menu for a month, but two weeks later the producer tells me that there is no more of it. The guy is trying to develop a business, but he has no concept of my needs. Gradually, my part of the industry and farming are beginning to understand how each other's businesses work. Lack of such understanding is a huge barrier. We need something in the middle that will enable us to work together more collaboratively.

Do you know what that might be? God forbid, but is it a role for Government? Is it a role for the NFU or for colleges? If your experience is common to others, that is a problem. Whose job is it to facilitate relations between farmers and chefs?

My experience is common to everyone in the sector. I talk to chefs every day, and all of them have the same problem. I do not know whose job it is to facilitate relations between the two groups. One approach is to form co-operatives. When I talk to chefs in France, they tell me that local procurement is not an issue there, because they have co-operatives in which people work together and service one another. We do not have that system here. There are a couple of schemes. In Arran, for example, a group of suppliers, growers and farmers have got together to organise distribution. It is much easier for me to buy certain things from Arran than to buy them a couple of miles down the road in Perth.

Food networks might be a solution.

It is curious that procurement issues, which are a big obstacle here, do not appear to be a challenge in France, despite the fact that, presumably, people there operate within the same regulatory framework that we do.

Perhaps they do not adhere to the rules.

Do we think that that is the reason?

I do not know.

I return to the earlier question about whether and where there should be more investment in science. I do not say that there should be more investment, but climate change and other issues are making the questions more complex. Our Scottish science base has been very component based in its development. We have a world-class crop research institute and a world-class animal research institute, but we have probably not invested in looking at integrated agricultural systems or in research that brings together social scientists and crop and animal scientists so that we can answer the more complex, difficult questions that are emerging now. We must focus on that area in the future.

Bill Slee said that we need competitive agriculture. Presumably he did not mean competitive in the sense that the industry understands the term—competitive without subsidy. I suspect that the Oxfams of this world would say that, although the World Trade Organization has had some success in opening up agriculture, the third world thinks that it is getting stuffed, because it is being opened up to our produce at the same time as we, the rest of Europe and the Yanks continue to subsidise our agriculture.

In the short term, European agriculture cannot be competitive without the single farm payment. We will continue to have a common agricultural policy of sorts until 2013. I am sure that members are aware that the Westminster Government is keen for pillar 1 to be dismantled. If we look at the performance figures for the past decade, it is almost inconceivable that Scottish agriculture could have survived without either production subsidy or the single farm payment that is now available. Scottish agriculture needs to be able to perform alongside the most efficient agriculture in Europe, but there will continue to be a subsidy component. It would be almost impossible for us to unhitch from that in the short term, although people such as Tangermann have talked about degressive support to the farm sector and that appears to be part of European thinking. However, that might require much stronger support of pillar 2-type payments, some of which could support a much stronger development of, for example, the local food sector—the rural development plan, in other words.

I want to pick up on Bill Slee's comments about abattoirs. He might not be aware that although Orkney's abattoir is bigger than the ones in Islay and Mull, the throughput is still such that waste is dealt with only once a week and there are serious problems with on-transport, which makes the business potentially unviable. That raises questions about the regulatory framework, in relation not just to dead stock but to livestock. The European Commission has issued a consultation on further restrictions on the transportation of live animals, despite there being no body of evidence that things have changed in the couple of years since the rules were set.

When we discuss high-quality sustainable management of not just livestock but resources in general, I question whether we are blurring the signals, given the feedback that we get from consumers, who continue to buy on the basis of price. What can we do to improve the situation, rather than simply drive through a regulatory environment that is not reflected in the retail sector, with its two-for-one offers, supersizing and unseasonal food? Andrew Fairlie talked about consumption patterns. We have not got things right. We are perhaps quick to legislate without taking a broad view of the benefit that will arise from the legislation and the consumption patterns that will support it.

A simple thing that the Government could do to help the situation would be to deliver the guidance on sustainable procurement that it has been promising to produce for two or three years and for which we have been waiting since the Schools (Health Promotion and Nutrition) (Scotland) Act 2007 was passed. There are endless reports on how good sustainable procurement can be for local economies and, potentially, for the environment. However, without the guidance and the effort that would be made if guidance were issued, sustainable procurement will not happen. It would be valuable to have clear guidance that we should use the full-life-cycle environmental impact as well as the social and economic impacts of the £85 million a year that taxpayers in this country spend on the public procurement of food to do some good. The Government could achieve results relatively easily.

Probably the first question that I ask when I go to a country to do a food policy analysis is about the exchange rate. If a country is running an overvalued currency it is, in effect, taxing its farmers' exports and subsidising imports. For much of the past 30 years we have run an overvalued currency, because it happened to suit the City of London. That is affecting the viability of Scottish and English agriculture. Recent changes in currency and the devaluation—in effect—of the United States dollar have changed markets throughout the world. Being efficient is not a technical matter; it is about who is most efficient given the exchange rates.

I am worried about the wide range of issues that were discussed during the meeting this morning. We must start by considering the basics: have we got enough food for this year, next year and the year after that? Have we got a system? When we have an interlocked system we can start adding to it. The discussion paper "Choosing the Right Ingredients: The Future for Food in Scotland" raised 80 or 100 issues to do with food policy, but we cannot deal with so many issues. If the Government makes 80 different policies on 80 different strands, the policies will clash with one another and prevent one another from working, and we will end up with a food policy that has no effect or whose effect is the exact opposite of what it should be, as I have witnessed quite often. The issue for the committee is to try to cut down the number of issues that it considers to a maximum of about 10.

Ten would be way more than we could manage. We have to cut it down considerably. Today's exercise will help us to zero in on some of the key areas.

I want to return briefly to the issue of competitive agriculture. It is clear from the make-up of farm income that the majority of farms could not survive without the single farm payment in its current form. We have to be careful about how we think about this issue. As long as the single farm payment exists, there is no incentive for farmers to wean themselves off it and to become more efficient. Initiatives such as the profit without subsidies approach try to get farmers into the mindset that they should put the payment to one side and consider how to make their business profitable. We all need support for a while, and there might be an argument under Tangerman for a digressive system to allow people to move away from it, but we need to be in the mindset that we need agriculture that is profitable without support. How we get there is the challenge. It will take time, but we need to get into that mindset, rather than think that we need to keep the single farm payment to maintain agriculture.

I am a farmer, so I declare an interest in all this. The reality in Scotland and elsewhere in the world is that the supermarkets understand and know every farmer's costs for every commodity in the world, whether grapes in South Africa, avocados, or lamb on the west coast of Scotland. I see an underclass of farmer developing—men and women who are never out of overalls seven days a week. They experience subsistence living, which is no different in sub-Saharan Africa or the west of Scotland—it just comes down to an accident of birth. Until farmers worldwide are given a fair return from the marketplace—which they are not getting at the moment—they cannot live without support, as you suggest.

There is an issue here. A classic example comes from our own farm in the south of England. We grew seed peas for Birds Eye, for which we were given a price per tonne. However, as soon as the area payment was introduced in 1992, Birds Eye immediately reduced the price because it realised that we were getting an area payment as well. As you say, because the supermarkets understand the system, they adapt what they pay on the basis of the policy. If the policy did not exist, they would not be able to do that.

It is a matter for policy makers and Government to ensure that, if a proper and genuine free market exists, it is somehow regulated.

How do you have a proper free market that is somehow regulated?

There is a pot of issues around the global dynamic of trade. I sometimes wonder who the subsidies are subsidising and whether they are, in fact, subsidising the retail industry—farmers receive the subsidy, but it is passed on to the retail industry to generate massive profit. Tracking the degree of impact in relation to the spending power of the retailer, farmer or others in the supply chain reveals a huge amount about who is winning and who is losing in the process. The situation is the same globally. We talked about the impact of subsidies on farmers in Scotland. The impact on developing countries of subsidies for farmers in Scotland is also massive, because farmers in developing countries do not access the subsidies and they cannot compete with massively subsidised farmers in the global market.

Although the British Government's rhetoric in relation to trade justice and free trade rules is positive in support of developing countries, the deals that are being negotiated by the EU through the economic partnership agreements are far from fair—they are biased towards the interests of the private sector in the north. They are not going to benefit poor farmers in the south. They are not even going to benefit the national economies of southern countries. Those deals, which have the interests of rich, consuming nations at their heart, are being negotiated consistently, as we speak. Any interests in relation to the environmental impact of the whole deal are absolutely off the table. We need a reality check about what is really happening in the trade agreement negotiations. It is difficult for developing countries to challenge those because—we talk about this issue endlessly—they lack any power over markets. That has an inequitable impact on women and poor farmers across the world.

Going back to the issue of local food—I apologise for taking us back three quarters of an hour—I want to comment on an interesting point that was made earlier but which was not explored further, about the barriers to developing a stronger local food economy. Andrew Fairlie mentioned that Scottish farmers are not very good at coming together in co-operatives. Bill Slee said that the local food economy will always remain relatively small but will, nonetheless, play a more significant part than it does at the moment. I agree with both of those comments.

There is no doubt that Scottish farmers seem particularly ill-equipped to co-operate. If there is a single cause for the difference between the local food economy in Scotland and that of continental countries such as France, it is the Scots' apparent inability to co-operate with each other. There are innumerable examples of farmer and grower co-operatives being set up in Scotland and elsewhere in the UK but not working. Farmers need greater encouragement to co–operate, to ensure security and continuity of supply—

There is an historical bias against consensus in our culture.

That is an interesting cultural comment, on which I will not elaborate right now, but that point may be something to do with why we have such highly individualistic farmers in this country. That individualism is not replicated elsewhere, so that might account for part of the problem. In fairness to the Scottish Government, a lot is being done to encourage co-operation through the new co-operation scheme under the Scottish rural development programme, but it is too early to tell whether it will succeed.

However, there are other ways for producers to co-operate even if they are not part of a co-operative. In some areas, people have developed so-called food sheds—Professor Slee's submission uses the term "foodshed" in a topographical manner, analogous to that of "watershed", whereas I am talking simply about a warehouse—where they can aggregate their products in a way that ensures that local buyers have a sufficient diversity of supply to meet their needs. In other words, a food shed is simply a local hub. Such co-operation is happening, although not quite as much in Scotland as elsewhere in the UK, where it has been pioneered by the local food movement.

Another way of improving links is through farmers markets, as the committee heard earlier when it heard from the Scottish Association of Farmers Markets. The deputy convener knows a bit about this subject. Street markets are also important. Why is it that our street markets in Scotland have been in decline for so long? Why do we not invest in our wholesale market facilities, which are commonplace in every French and Italian town? We have not invested in the wholesale markets that supply street markets because we have relied on the supermarkets to provide for our food needs. We need more local markets and more community-supported agriculture. That is another model that would allow better links between producers and consumers.

Let me mention just two other points. We have already heard about processing facilities and abattoirs. It was good to hear positive references to the local abattoir on Mull, but such facilities should be available in other places, too. We need not just local abattoirs but local bottling plants and packing plants. Local facilities should be available across the food chain—not just for meat but for eggs, dairy, vegetables and fruit. In addition, if we have all those bits in place, we still need to ensure that the basis of local markets is guaranteed through public procurement. In other words, we need to ensure that we do the things that Adam Harrison mentioned earlier, as exemplified by East Ayrshire Council, which buys local unprocessed organic food for its school meals. If those four components are put together, the barriers to local food are removed. That could make a big difference to the scale of the local food economy in Scotland.

I want to return to the point about there being 80 issues in "Choosing the Right Ingredients". The issues need to be narrowed down significantly, but food occupies a fairly unique place in policy. We can probably get down to five main important policy areas. One is food safety. There has sometimes been concern about almost overzealous food safety regulation—we will all be familiar with the Lanark blue saga, which perhaps shows overregulation in the system.

Another issue that we have not touched on but which is important in Scotland is food and health. There is a clear and important connection between diet and coronary heart disease. That is a huge issue that cannot be ignored in considering food policy in Scotland. We should compare Scotland, which is the sick man of Europe in terms of coronary heart disease, with Finland and how it addressed a similar situation there. Important public policy lessons from that need to be addressed.

We have touched more on food production and the environment, which is another area in which policy is important. The fourth issue is to do with fair and competitive practices. That includes international dimensions, which Judith Robertson of Oxfam talked about, and the issues of corporate power in the food supply chain and the need for effective regulation of that power. The final issue, which has also only been touched on, is how food policy in a broad sense connects to rural development. The SRDP connects partially to food policy, but it remains to be seen whether there are enough elements in the policy to dynamise and develop the local food sector.

I want to raise a potential obstacle that was mentioned this morning but which nobody has touched on this afternoon. Hugh Raven described the coherent picture that is needed, but he did not mention the skills capacity to do some of the things that he mentioned. I guess that that applies to some of Bill Slee's comments, too. We just skip over the ability to establish the necessary skills to do what we want to do. Does anybody have a comment on that?

Some of the most alarming data in "A Forward Strategy for Scottish Agriculture: Next Steps" and the various reviews of agricultural strategy in Scotland are on the difference in performance between the top third and the bottom third of farmers. There is a skills gap.

The issue is not only about farmers.

No—I am using that as an example. The top third of Scottish farmers perform reasonably well financially, even when times are hard, but the performance of the bottom third is absolutely appalling. That implies that there is a skills gap. I think that we would find highly differential performance in other sectors, too. Investment in human capital is important throughout the agri-food system. With new initiatives on reconnecting hotels, restaurants and ordinary consumers to local farmers who can offer direct sales, there is a lot of new learning to be done.

So you endorse some of Andrew Fairlie's criticisms about the capacity in agriculture to pick up on what is needed. The next question is whether the research shows differences geographically. For example, does it factor in crofters, who farm part time? How nuanced is that research?

A lot depends on local individuals who are prepared to invest effort and to dynamise solutions. Arran has been mentioned, and we could talk about the local food networks on Skye. Local food successes tend to involve dynamic individuals who are prepared to invest a great deal of effort in their promotion and development. I am not sure how far that should be a matter of public policy and how much it should be endogenously determined by the existence of public-spirited and dynamic individuals. I suspect that we need a balance of both, but we do not want to create long-term state subsidy for local food—we want local food to get up and run by itself.

In the research that you mentioned, were the poorer-performing farmers the hill farmers and crofters? Is that what is being counted?

No. Some dynamic individuals on Skye responded to Shirley Spear at the Three Chimneys and are now supplying salad crops for the local food sector. In almost all the eight or 10 sectors of Scottish agriculture, variation exists right across the board. It is not a question of being small or big.

So whichever sector we look at, there is the same third of poorer-performing farmers.

It is not about small and big; it is about the economic, marketing and technical skills of the farmers.

Alan Renwick wishes to contribute. Is it specifically on this point?

It is. We have done a lot of work at the SAC on technical efficiency. The same point is true across the board: no matter how we categorise, in the same geographical regions and on the same types of farm, we still find a wide spread of performance.

Is that different to any other industry?

No. Exactly the same situation might apply to chefs, for example.

All industries will have a top third.

Including politicians.

Indeed. So your experience is that the same situation is mirrored in your industry.

Absolutely. It is all very well for us to go on about all the benefits of buying locally, good marketing and so on, but if the product is not dealt with properly, it is an absolute waste of time. There is a huge skills gap in my industry. There is an attitude of, "I don't understand it and I don't want to understand it." It is almost too easy not to cook nowadays.

You are at the top end of your industry.

Yes.

The bottom end might be the transport caff, or something.

It is the local pub, hotel and everything underneath. At the top end, we are very well served in Scotland. Underneath that, there is a huge skills gap in producing and providing good, fresh, locally sourced food.

We are focusing on the producer end of things, which I can understand, but, to an extent, we have glossed over the fact that, as consumers, our relationship with food is not as informed as it should be. Mention has been made of what happens in France and Spain. I dare say that it is a result of many things, but the appreciation of food and of the meaning of mealtimes among people there is significantly different compared with Scotland. In Belgium, farmers markets and other local markets did exceptionally well on Sundays, when no supermarket was allowed to open, so farmers markets ruled the roost for that day, although that was not enough to drive people's appreciation of food. What more could we do to increase awareness of what good-quality food is and to become a more demanding clientele, whether we are dining out at Gleneagles, in the local hotel or wherever?

I am conscious that we are getting into what Peter Bowbrick might call balsamic vinegar territory. I am aware of the point—before Peter comes jumping in.

Peter Bowbrick proposed a list of 10 points, and Bill Slee has given us a list of five points. I wonder what other committee members think. Would they take the same list of five main points or would they take different points? I will remind members of Bill Slee's points, in case they have not taken them down. If I have noted them down correctly, they are: food safety regulation, food and health, food production and environment, fair and competitive practices, and food and rural development. Do other committee members have views on those five points?

Do you mean witnesses?

Yes, I meant to say witnesses.

We have terms of reference consisting of half a page. You can look at them to guide your policy.

I was going to jump in at the balsamic vinegar stage, but I suspect that the point about quality is important. We tend to get dewy-eyed about local produce, thinking only of the tasty, good-quality produce. Equally, there is some rubbish local produce. That is where the supermarkets have scored. Their stuff is not all top quality, but people know that they get a pretty uniform product there, which is always the same. We might rail against it, but the supermarkets have been very successful. The same thing applies with beer, for example. We might effectively get keg muck, but it is of uniform quality. Real beer can be excellent, but with a bad cellarman it can be dreadful. Anyway, I declare an interest.

Alasdair Morgan has just described the bottom third, so to speak.

You perhaps underestimate how much people's knowledge and interest in food has changed dramatically even over the past five years. In the restaurant, I see that people's interest in the provenance of their food is growing all the time. I do a lot of work in schools, which is a lot easier now than it was 10 years ago, because even schoolchildren are beginning to cotton on to food issues. That is really exciting.

Dr Bowbrick made the point about balsamic vinegar. The global politics of food and how that relates to third world countries is not my area of expertise, but from a Scottish perspective and from my side of the industry, people are genuinely interested—more than they ever have been—in food, food safety and food procurement.

In that case, why do we tolerate the sandwiches that are still produced by so many British hotels, cafes and restaurants?

We tolerate it because that is all that is available.

That is a whole separate inquiry.

I am interested in schools, in how we educate a new generation of children about their eating habits, and in what children want and expect when they grow up. With regard to school lunches, the debate is about quality as well as cost and availability; it is all right to provide something for nothing, but not if it is not edifying or tasty. Children will not be encouraged if vegetables are cooked for too long; there may be a skills gap in that regard. How can we as politicians—or the public sector—play a more active part in that side of things? What can we do to drive change in how our children are fed during the school day?

In answer to Bill Wilson's question about the limited—I hope—list of priorities that we ought to deal with, a review of the Scottish diet action plan produced some clear objectives. The overarching objective was not to approach the problem as a series of separate health, rural development or environment issues, but to seek to integrate them.

One of the interesting things that WWF did at the time of the work on school meals was to look at the ecological footprint of Scotland's diet, and to compare the average diet that is consumed in Scotland with Government guidance on healthy eating. That research showed something like a 20 per cent drop in the ecological footprint, which is an indicator of the environmental burden of the food. We are trying to reach a win-win situation, and we are asking whether a healthier diet can mean an environmentally sustainable diet.

Another key conclusion of the review—which was headed by Tim Lang, who was mentioned this morning—was that we need to get the business behind the food chain involved in these questions as much as Government and civil society are. He pointed out that we can talk about the issue until we are blue in the face, but until the people who provide the food on our plates are as engaged as the rest of us are, progress will be only an aspiration and not a reality. We need to think hard, as we did in tackling the smoking problem. Perhaps we have gone as far as we can do with encouraging and cajoling people, and we need to think about better regulation to effect some of those changes.

Where does choice lie in all that?

Choice is part of education, which was the question that was asked. People need to understand the implications of their choice, with regard to their personal health, to environmental health or to societies around the world. Just as we ought to improve labelling about the sourcing of food, perhaps we ought to label with regard to other impacts of food.

Figures from the Food and Agriculture Organization suggest that global food production will have to rise by 50 per cent by 2030, which is only 22 years away. What does the panel feel about that? What role should Scotland play in meeting an increasing global demand for food? Could we double our production? Should we be trying? What part has research to play?

I do not know whether Scotland could double its production; that is not in my area of expertise. However, clear proposals have existed for years for doubling food production globally. The proposals relate to investing in rural agriculture. A total of 80 per cent of the world's poorest people live on subsistence agriculture. They live not in cities or towns, but on the land. Globally, in the past 20 years, the amount of investment in such producers has gone down massively. The amounts that are invested now are very small and virtually insignificant. Economies could be made much more food secure, and could easily double their production, if there were proper and detailed investment in poor producers—supporting their access to markets, and sustaining their business processes.

How would you bring that about—in sub-Saharan east Africa in particular?

I would increase aid flows. In 2005, the G8 made clear commitments at the Gleneagles hotel to increase aid flows. The promise was to deliver $50 billion annually to developing countries, but that promise is not being kept. We are currently $30 billion below target. A condition that was attached to those aid flows was that investment would be in countries' Government strategies that invested in rural agriculture and in health and education systems at local level.

Analysis has shown that climate change will impact massively on people's vulnerability. For example, if sea levels rise even by a metre, millions of people in Bangladesh will be put off their land. There will be untold poverty, and changing weather patterns are already causing such poverty. There will have to be investment in adaptation measures to combat the negative impacts of climate change, and the estimate is again $50 billion. However, that is a small amount of money when we consider what our Government has just paid to help Northern Rock out of its financial predicament, and when we consider what we are investing in the Iraq war.

The figures that I have mentioned are not the investment that the British Government might make but the investment that international Governments might make. The only thing that is preventing it is a lack of political will. Anything that the Scottish Government could do to prop up that political will in Britain would be hugely welcomed.

It is probably infinitely easier to double the production of sub-Saharan Africa than to double the production of Scotland. It would be relatively cheap, although there are problems of corrupt Governments, lack of research and bad price policies. In effect, those price policies are taxing small farmers out of existence. It goes back to exchange rates. We are taxing their exports, subsidising imports, and wrecking farmers' businesses.

I will bring in Bill Slee. What will be the future capacity of agriculture in Scotland? Remembering what Michael Gibson said this morning, we must not exclude fisheries and aquaculture from our consideration of food production.

Food production could and would increase in Scotland if there were significantly higher prices, but a key issue is the increased volatility of agricultural prices that has been highly evident in the past 18 months or so. We have seen significant improvements in the beef and sheep sectors, but we have seen enormous volatility in grain prices, which have come back a great deal this year.

That issue has arisen because we now operate under a much more global trading system, which will make farmers loth to invest, especially when long-term decisions are involved. For example, if a farmer wants to keep a heifer calf now to produce beef, it will be three years or so before they can produce a return on that. Given price volatility, I suspect that farmers will not respond to rising prices. The production cycle in cereals is much shorter.

One or two sectors in Scotland have an advantage. Coming back to Alan Renwick's pea example, very warm nights in Lincolnshire and other parts of eastern England in which peas are produced cause the crop to go past its ideal processing point very quickly. I talked to a pea viner in eastern Scotland who was extremely happy at the global warming effects in southern England because they advantage eastern Scotland. I suspect that eastern Scotland, the Moray firth and the whole eastern seaboard of arable land in Scotland may experience a dynamic supply response in field vegetable production. However, I am not so sure whether that benefit will extend to other parts of Scotland, which have seen, according to the recent SAC report, very large amounts of stock coming off the hills in some regions. However, there is no doubt that that stock is coming off the hills because of the current unprofitability of production.

If prices change, therefore, there will be a supply response. I do not believe that we could double output in many sectors of Scottish agriculture, but there could be a significant increase in some sectors.

You mentioned instability in the markets. In essence, the WTO carrying on down the direction of travel in which it was going before it came to a grinding halt would be a market-driven solution for food production. If we are to consider food security, we must take the peaks and troughs—in other words, the instability—out of the market. I do not want to put words in your mouth, but how would you take the peaks and troughs out of the market to secure food for years to come in years of plenty and years of famine?

I am not sure that we have a simple solution. Countries such as New Zealand used to operate with buffer stocks. We used to operate with deficiency payments, then we went into a tariff barrier, which was a variable import levy policy. Such policies protect us from year-to-year variations at the country level, but if things start to go wrong—in other words, if production continues to increase—we can end up completely bankrupting an economy. That is what happened in the early 1990s in New Zealand, when the cost of storing the buffer stock was too great for the Government to bear. Thereafter, New Zealand went on to a much more free-market policy. We may have to look to better risk management in the farm sector so that farmers can live through volatility in prices and accept the rough with the smooth. However, that is a rather different environment from the one that European farmers have been used to for a long time.

I want to explore some of the issues around where increased global production will happen, which will be in countries such as Brazil and Indonesia that have abundant cheap land and labour. There are serious concerns about what that might mean for the iconic environments in which that expansion happens. Agriculture is the biggest driver of native habitat loss around the world and the biggest consumer of water used by man, so we have concerns. Equally, however, I have experience from my work with major commodities—soya in Brazil and palm oil in Indonesia—in which the entire supply chain has got together and tried to sort itself out in terms of certification of how to produce the commodities and expand production without damaging the environment. Those involved have also tried to look for the win-wins in which resource efficiency for those commodities translates into less pollution and less use of soil and water, which pleases environmentalists like me, and is money saving for the producer and the supply chain. There is optimism that such matters can be resolved and sustainable solutions can be found, not only for the producers but for the consumers.

To return to procurement, certified produce—whether it is fish from Scottish seas certified by the Marine Stewardship Council or palm oil from Indonesia certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil—is available and one can specify such produce. We ought to look for opportunities to ensure that the added value of doing something sustainable is passed on to the producer through the supply chain.

I will reinforce the emerging consensus that the appetite for food is unlikely to double in Scotland, so I do not think that there will be a significant increase in production in Scotland. Having said that, I am sure that, as Professor Slee said, the dynamics of the market will change Scottish production.

I will add one dimension of increasing demand that we have missed. We anticipate a global human population of 9 billion by the middle of the century, but we should also anticipate an additional population of 4 billion human-equivalent livestock. It is topical to mention the impact of that, not least in light of the comments by the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change who, speaking in London last night, said that we should eat less meat.

We should eat less meat but, lest I be howled down in a meat-producing country, we need to break that down further. We do not need to eat much less meat in Scotland, which will remain a specialist meat producer, particularly a specialist red-meat producer. Over the past generation, we have accustomed ourselves to eating a lot more white meat than we did when our parents were around, and that white meat depends on products that we do not grow in abundance in this country. In other words, we import cereals that we could feed to people and feed them to pigs and poultry instead.

I apologise to my friends in the pig and poultry industries, but they do not have such a bonnie future as red-meat producers in Scotland. Scotland will be a specialist red-meat production country, in addition to diversifying into other crops as we heard from Professor Slee. We will become much more self-sufficient with regard to some of the things that we currently import, including a lot of fruit and vegetables that we could grow here. We have the best possible soft-fruit growing conditions in Scotland but our soft-fruit industry is declining year on year and has declined massively over the past two decades.

Some of those consumption changes are driven entirely by price. The reason why so much white meat, particularly poultry, is now eaten in comparison with 50 years ago is that the production methods have changed radically. Once upon a time, virtually all the chickens were free range and nobody thought that they were rearing free-range chickens. However, once the concept of battery farming was introduced and the price fell, the consumption spike started to go up.

I agree with you up to a point. It is certainly true that a decline in husbandry costs was associated with intensification, but the cost of feeding the creatures has gone up enormously in the past two or three years with the increase in grain prices. Almost all global analysts think that the current grain price increase is not a flash in the pan. I take Professor Slee's comment that the grain price has come back a bit in the recent past but, nonetheless, all the projections are that grain prices will remain much higher than they have been historically. If that is the case, we will not be able to afford to produce large quantities of white meat in Scotland. However, using our natural advantage—namely grass—we produce beef cattle and sheep well. We will continue to do that, but we will produce much less white meat because we will not be able to afford it.

We can explore further some of the possibilities for our food production capacity that are connected with being more efficient, fuel consumption, grain prices and other matters that are adding cost in Scotland.

About eight points have arisen that I want to address.

That is the problem with a round-table discussion.

The first of my points follows on from Hugh Raven's point. The call to eat less meat must take into account how efficient the beef and sheep sectors are at converting grass into food. We have the advantage in Scotland, and that is a key point.

I was interested in the price volatility issue. I attended a conference at the European Association of Agricultural Economists, in Ghent, and on the first day there was a big session about the impact of price volatility. It asked exactly the question that John Scott asked—we have price volatility; what can we do about it? The FAO made it clear—a bit like Bill Slee's response—that buffer stocks are not the answer. Economists can draw nice diagrams showing how buffer stocks work, but in practice they are virtually impossible to—

That is what not to do. Is the FAO able to tell us what to do?

That was the difficulty—I thought that it was going to give us the answer. It concerns me that, having moved away from price support, which effectively gave us stable prices and gave signals to farmers to produce—although, okay, they overproduced—we still have the economic problem of instability, which can have damaging effects and lead to underproduction because of price volatility. Policy needs to get a grasp on what we can do to address that problem while not encouraging oversupply.

And?

So, what is your answer, then?

It is difficult. It comes back to the other issue about doubling our capacity. There are fundamental problems in talking in that way. For example, in Scotland, we have a sustainable forestry strategy that argues that we should increase forestry in Scotland to cover 25 per cent of the land area. So, one policy is working in that direction while we are talking about food security. You also heard this morning about the biofuels debate. I have always been nervous about discussion of biofuels in Scotland. I think that we need to understand its implications for Scotland.

In dealing with instability, it is easier to say that we need to be aware of it. I am saying not that we need simply to maintain capacity just in case, but that we need to ensure that we are producing the economically correct amounts, not underproducing because of instability. I admit that I was an advocate of buffer stocks—

Who decides the correct amount to even it out?

If it is left simply to the market to decide it, the market will produce the instability that you talk about.

Yes; it has always been clear that there is a market failure. Okay, freer trade may iron that out across the world to some extent, and we would always argue that our protectionist policies have, in the past, exacerbated the instability. It can be shown clearly that if one or two big countries begin to protect, they push their instability on to the world market and make it more unstable. Freer trade will help to remove some of that.

I could say lots in response to that. However, I want to bring biofuels into the equation around food security globally. They are playing a huge role at the moment, and some of that is being driven by northern Governments' policies around targets on biofuels in the fuel supply. However, Oxfam is saying "Don't go for those targets", because the production of biofuels is not regulated sensibly or sustainably. The kind of model that Adam Harrison talked about in relation to palm oil does not exist for biofuels; therefore, land grabs, deforestation and a range of not just unsustainable but seriously damaging processes are occurring globally. That potentially institutionalises a further industry structure that is not in our best interests.

The increasing demand for biofuels is taking the food out of the mouths of poor families in many developing countries. We are not saying that there should not be a biofuels industry or that some of the fuel supply should not be replaced with biofuels; we are saying that that should not be done in a way that will completely undermine other perfectly adequate and realistic development processes. Also, it should be done not in a hurry, but to a timescale that allows a transition and the infrastructure to be put in place. For example, there is a huge opportunity for developing country Governments and farmers to take part in and contribute meaningfully to the biofuels industry. However, the way in which the system is set up means that that cannot happen. A regulated and managed transition process needs to be put in place to ensure that the distribution of the industry is equitable and sustainable.

As always, the problem that we face is the complexity of the issue. A huge number of factors have led to the current crisis. We have heard about the lack of storage capacity. Globally, we now take a last-minute approach to food supply. We have got rid of the food mountains that buffered demand and supply. We have also heard about the increasing demand for food as a result of rising and wealthier populations. There has been a shift towards grain-fed animal products. There is also talk of increased demand for biofuels, but not even 2 per cent of global agricultural crops goes into energy production. Obviously, if demand grows as projected, that figure will increase.

An issue that has not yet been raised is the financial markets and the massive speculation of recent times. Money has been flowing out of the junk mortgage market in America. People have been looking for somewhere else to put their money, and that has driven up not only commodity prices but input prices for commodities such as fertilisers. It is difficult to see how Scotland can buffer itself from all of that or how it will work out what it needs to do in response.

The infamous pork belly futures spring to mind.

First-generation biofuels, including fuels from wheat and sugar cane and biodiesel from rape, are land hungry. A lot of investment is going into second-generation biofuels, which work on waste products, and there are also third-generation biofuels that come from algae. They offer promise.

We need to understand the demand for biofuels. Part of the explanation lies in the desire for fuel security in North America, but it also relates to the overriding imperative to replace the fossil hydrocarbons that we put in our cars and planes with something else so that we can continue to drive and fly.

This week, the Scottish Government adopted the very bold target of an 80 per cent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2050. Given that agriculture, forestry and land use contribute roughly 20 per cent of those emissions, everything else in Scotland will have to shut down or change dramatically if the target is to be met.

We have to think about where our hydrocarbons will come from and we need a research base that builds capacity in that direction. Of course, that will happen globally and not only in Scotland. If we look at the relative success and carbon efficiency of sugar-based bioethanol production in Brazil—albeit that there are problems—we can see the possibilities, but I suspect that we may well want to move on to second and third-generation biofuels to meet the needs that will exist. We must not throw the baby out with the bath water. We have to think about biofuels and their role in helping us to meet climate change targets.

I have a small point to make on speculation, about which there was much discussion at the conference to which I referred. A consensus emerged that speculation had not caused the problem. The report that I am giving is somewhat second hand, but I recollect that people said that speculation was not a major factor in rising prices.

I have a brief point on what Bill Slee said about Scotland's 80 per cent target for the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. It seems strange that we think that we can continue to do as we have done before and still meet the target. This debate gives us the opportunity to say that we need to shift how we do things in food as in transport. We cannot continue as we are; we cannot just replace fossil fuels with biomass—

What do we have to shift?

Electrification of transport is one example. The majority of trips in the world are for short distances, and are perfectly feasible with electric transport—

The Rural Affairs and Environment Committee will not be able to consider that issue in the context of a food inquiry.

We are talking about renewable electricity generation. Instead of trying to get energy out of biomass, maybe Scotland ought to think about other ways of getting energy out of land or about using biomass for other things. We should be using biomass for heat rather than attempting to produce liquid transport fuels. That is a far more efficient way of using a piece of land and the biomass on that land. The problem is that it is all related and we cannot separate these things out.

Can you pull anything out of the current food supply chain?

Exactly. The three biggest hitters in agriculture in terms of climate are the nitrates that are used in fertilisers, which were mentioned this morning; the methane from ruminants; and the carbon that is released from cultivating soil. All three need to be addressed. Some things will be relatively easy to address. Managing nitrogen and how it moves around the system means that we will be able to cut pollution of bathing waters and freshwater, which is already a priority for the Scottish Government. However, we will also need to address things such as the import of soya from Latin America to feed animals. Basically, we are importing nitrogen from the other side of the world and dumping it into Scottish rivers. That is not sustainable.

Another difficult issue is our approach to the cultivation of soil in order to cut carbon emissions. Luckily, at the moment, that is balanced by the amount of carbon that is locked up by afforestation, but perhaps there is an argument for more forests in Scotland and less agricultural land. However, if we just export the demand for food elsewhere, we will not address the issue. That is why my opening point was that we need to consider the consumption impacts on climate and not just the production impacts.

I agree substantially with Adam Harrison, but I think that he missed one thing out, which is that we need more biodigesters—an issue that is related to food. We need to resolve our food waste problems and our other organic waste problems, whether it be straw, other crop residues or indeed the product of the slaughterhouse in Orkney that was mentioned by Liam McArthur. We need to be shovelling that into digesters and turning it into high-quality renewable fuel that is available locally.

Research is fundamental. For the past 25 to 50 years, Scottish agriculture has been exporting the results of its research programme. I have worked in several countries that have a research-based agriculture. Ireland is an obvious example. It has an integrated food-processing and production research unit. In New Zealand, £1 million a year is spent on the library journal subscriptions for horticulture alone—and all we know about is kiwi fruit. That represents a massive investment in agricultural research. The example of Zimbabwe is surprising. Until the 1990s, Zimbabwe led the world in tobacco and averaged 7 tonnes of maize an acre. It had a level of investment in research that Britain has never seen. It had luxury research institutes that moved farms every couple of years because they wanted new research facilities. That is a luxury that Britain does not have.

I am wondering about two things. First, do we have sufficient research? Research is what we are marketing. Secondly, do we have a way of getting it to the farmers so that they can use it? The question was raised this morning. Are the farmers getting the skills set? That fits in with Adam Harrison's question.

When Adam Harrison talked about nitrogen, it reminded me of a conversation that we had outside the room. I want to ask Bill Slee about the genetically modified nitrogen-fixing plants.

There are a number of issues there. On research capacity, Scotland has probably been better at retaining its land-based research capacity than have other parts of Britain. It is a compliment to Scotland that, even before devolution, it managed to sustain that research infrastructure. However, it is not unproblematic, and more resource or some reallocation of resource might be required to meet contemporary needs.

We talked about genetic modification at lunch time, and Hugh Raven advised us against it in his introductory comments. If genetic modification could put the nitrogen-fixing capability of plants such as legumes into cereals, that would be an extraordinarily valuable outcome for the world. I have no idea how close we are to doing that, but it would go a long way towards addressing the world food problem because it would deliver organic nitrogen to plants that hitherto have not had that capacity. I would find it difficult to deny a hungry world that possibility.

I smiled to myself when Adam Harrison listed the areas of research because we are working in all of them. One project, which we call green pig, is considering the replacement of soya in pig diets with home-produced legumes. We are also doing some work for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on marginal abatement costs for carbon emissions from agriculture. The key thing in that research is the ranking of the alternatives that are available to enable agriculture to reduce its emissions. We are gaining an understanding of which alternatives are viable and which are not. That understanding is not out there at the moment, so the research is useful.

In general, research is being done in the right areas and we are trying to address the questions.

Andrew, do you consider whether food is genetically modified before you serve it or do you just say, "No, it doesn't matter"?

We do not use it.

You deliberately avoid it.

Yes.

Why is that?

Just because we do not know where it is going, I suppose. Again, it is not my area of expertise. I am sure that, from Oxfam's perspective, if GM is going to cure all hunger in the third world, we should go with it.

I am not sure that that is Oxfam's perspective. That might be the opposite of its view. Is your perspective led by your decision-making process or is it consumer led, from where you sit in the food chain?

I would say that it is both, equally.

So you are uncertain and the consumers are a bit resistant.

They are equally uncertain.

There is no easy answer, but at present genetic modification does not benefit poor producers. This is not my area of expertise, so forgive me if I use the wrong language. If genetic modification involves taking out the seed potential of the plant, production is a one-off and farmers have to buy seeds every year in order to maintain production. At present, most poor farmers can get seeds from the food that they grow.

There is a huge issue around the processes, which are not necessarily intended to advantage poor farmers. They are intended to advantage the big businesses that invest in the research. From our perspective, it is a case of horses for courses. What will be the impact on the poor producer? Will it benefit their lifestyle or put them further into poverty? Our agency's goal is to reduce poverty, so we consider the issue from that perspective.

I want to temper the enthusiasm about GM, if I may. That is not the same thing as suggesting that we slam the door on GM for ever more, although some of my colleagues in the organic movement suggest that that is precisely what we should do. I do not advocate that, but a bit of sobriety about the limitations of the benefits of GM is appropriate. GM was introduced with fanfares and joyous predictions of increased yields, but not even the GM companies now claim that GM crops have increased yields.

The history of GM production over the past decade and more is that it produces no increases in yields. That is a fact, not opinion on my part; Monsanto will concede that that is the case. The history of GM production also indicates that GM crops are not better able to deal with aridity than conventional crops. In fact, if I may bang the drum specifically for organic farming, I point out that the best way to counteract aridity is to farm organically. That increases soil organic matter—soil carbon—which is the best way of retaining water that we have yet discovered. To avoid the problems of increasing aridity, we should farm more organically rather than more GM-dependently.

GM has also shown that it reduces labour requirements as it facilitates mechanisation of agriculture. In most of the world, the last thing that we need is to take more people out of farming. In most of the world, the majority of the population will remain involved in farming. Throwing them out of farming into some uncertain other future employment does not seem a good way of improving food security or meeting human needs.

Conversely, we have seen that the GM crops grown so far are significantly more chemical dependent than the alternatives. Indeed, they are bred to be chemical dependent. That is exactly why the GM crops that are grown commercially have been brought to market—they are resistant to certain patented chemicals.

Let us add to that a point that we have already heard from Judith Robertson, which is that a lot of the crops are so-called terminator technologies as farmers cannot keep the seed and continue to grow the crop. They become dependent on the agroindustrial complex—I hope that I am not misquoting Bill Slee—to supply their most basic ingredient in the form of seeds. That is another highly negative outcome of GM dependency, particularly in developing countries where seeds would traditionally be saved.

Finally, those comments do not even enter into the issue of food safety. I would contend that tests so far have been nothing like rigorous enough. We also saw the disgraceful treatment of a scientist in Scotland who raised food safety issues that have never been properly explored. There are a number of very good reasons to be cautious about GM dependency.

This question is on a different point. On more than one occasion in the past hour or so, we have touched on competing land uses. One question is whether there is a case for more forestry or more agricultural land, and there is also increasing recreational demand on land. As a committee, we are examining rural housing, in which one issue is a shortage of land for housing. We also recently made recommendations about using agricultural land for flood management. Should we be thinking about having more land for farming and agricultural production, or is that not an issue as we cannot make a big contribution to meeting the world's food needs and so should carry on in our present merry way? Are there views around the table on that issue?

One thing that Europe has got right in the past decade is recognition of a multifunctional model of agriculture. That model can be transferred to forestry too. Many recreational and tourism needs will be well met by having proper multifunctional agriculture and forestry. Within Scotland, there is significant investment in amenity land for sport, shooting and so on. That can also deliver multiple benefits. We do not always get it right in the short term—and getting it right can place new demands on researchers—but in general the model of multifunctionality can be justified and sustained in Scotland.

If we consider recent history, we see that much of the land, as long as it is not high in organic matter and high-carbon soils but has come out of agriculture in the hills and uplands, could conceivably sequester carbon effectively. I do not think that it is necessary to maintain exactly the stock of farmland that we have at the moment. In any case, over much of that farmland there is multifunctional use, including sporting use.

In the past, the Macaulay Institute has dabbled with the idea of agroforestry, which allows those different uses to be linked together quite effectively. There might be scope for such developments in the future, although I suspect that they will take a slightly different form.

An example of multifunctional land use that is of key relevance to the committee is a flood plain. I do not see why land should be seen as being available only for flooding, only for forestry or only for agriculture. Meadows combined two functions. People would graze animals on a flood plain rather than try to grow crops that they knew would be lost two years out of five. It seems sensible for us to go back to that.

I detect a sense of wind-down, so I will ask the witnesses whether there are any issues that they think we have spectacularly overlooked or failed to consider.

I return to the issue of who should do the work. World experts, preferably outsiders, must be brought in. We have had an extremely interesting discussion, but many of the suggestions have been made by single-issue people. That is natural—everyone is single issue in that everyone is focused on their own industry. We need outsiders to consider the issue.

A big sustainability impact of food that has been mentioned but not discussed in detail is the impact on fresh water. I am talking not only about the impacts of food production in Scotland on Scotland's rivers, lochs and groundwater—which is being addressed piecemeal in legislation, but on which a much more concerted effort and a much more focused expenditure of money are needed—but about the much bigger freshwater impact of all the commodities that we receive from around the world and the processing of that food. All the fruit and vegetables that are brought in from the Mediterranean are a case in point. People grow fruit and vegetables in those areas because they are dry and the climate can be controlled, but that involves drawing unsustainably on water resources. Supermarkets in the UK, France and Germany are the major customers for such produce. We need to think about the sustainability of food not just in Scotland but globally.

I will vindicate and oblige Peter Bowbrick by confirming that I come from a pressure group, albeit not a single-issue pressure group. As a representative of the Soil Association, I want to talk about soil. I suspect that that confirms Peter Bowbrick's suspicion.

Soil is that 6 inches of the surface of the earth that keeps us all alive. Governments around the world have not taken it nearly seriously enough. The Soil Association is not so named by mistake—we thought hard about what it was that created healthy plants, healthy people and a healthy biosphere. In its considerations about food, the committee should not disregard the importance of the primary source of food—the soil.

For my final point, I will revert to Hugh Raven's first point, which was about not looking for technological fixes. I believe that we should consider all the opportunities that technology offers to help us in such situations.

An issue that someone asked me to talk about in advance of the meeting is Malawi, so I will briefly do so now.

Food security issues are highly pertinent to Malawians and to the Scottish Government because it has a vested interest in that country and its development. At the moment, Malawi faces some quite difficult food security issues. There are good—or rather, mainly bad—reasons for that. One of them is to do with our insistence, globally, that when it comes to market process, one size must fit all. In effect, the liberalisation of economies that is a condition of countries receiving aid prevents them from making strategic decisions that would allow them to feed their people. An example is Malawi's decision to subsidise fertiliser, which bucked the trend of the one-size-fits-all approach to development. As a result, food production in Malawi has been transformed over the past few years.

Dr Renwick talked about food stocks and buffers. Malawi has put in place sensible institutions in that regard when it has been able to do so, but its approach has been undermined by free-market processes, which has put at risk the lives of millions of people. We must be aware of and stay alert to such issues, particularly given that our strong relationship with Malawi increases our understanding of the impact of issues that we are talking about in relation to Scotland.

The key lesson to take away is that, although food is an almost uniquely multifaceted issue, during the past decade and a half we have gone down a route towards a global free-trade model, based on an ideological commitment to free trade. We have not fully understood the consequences of taking that route. There are environmental consequences, because we might not factor in the environmental cost of produce that comes from different parts of the world or that is produced under regimes that we would not allow in this country. There are also impacts on livelihoods, which Judith Robertson talked about.

I wonder whether we in Scotland—the home of Adam Smith, political economy and free trade—need to reflect on whether such an approach in its entirety is appropriate for something as complex as food and on whether we need a little more regulation, particularly of the environmental dimensions but also of the social dimensions, so that we understand better how food policy impacts on people's lives and livelihoods and on the planet around us. I am not sure that we have quite got there yet.

All that sounds very grand, but I want to bring the discussion back to the Scottish perspective. It is fantastic that we are having this discussion at all. We have made progress, but as a chef and restaurateur—and as a food person—I hope that we can engage children and educate them about food. We have lost a generation, but we can do something about the generation that is coming up. I hope that we will continue to have such discussions in the years to come, but I hope that we will consider matters on a much more local—I mean Scottish—level, which is where we can make a difference. I am not sure that we can sort out global food problems, but we can sort out local problems.

I thank all the witnesses who attended this afternoon's meeting. Some of you also sat in on the meeting this morning, to listen to the evidence. If you want to communicate something to the committee you can do so by contacting the clerks, who will circulate your comments to all committee members, so if you wake up at 3 am and think, "Damn it, I should have said such and such," you can act on it and—

Phone you.

Do not phone us at 3 am, but let us know your thoughts.

The committee intends to conduct a full inquiry into food at some point, but we have not yet timetabled it into our programme. The purpose of today's exercise was to enable us to begin to grasp the complexities of the issue and start to focus on a remit for the inquiry. We might ask some of you to come back and talk to us again. Other witnesses might be displeased when we do not include 75 of the 80 or so themes to do with food. Peter Bowbrick said that we would be overreaching ourselves if we tried to consider too many issues and we agree with his assessment. We cannot consider all the themes, so issues that strongly interest some of you might not be included in the remit for our inquiry. You must bear with us.

That concludes the public part of the meeting.

Meeting continued in private until 16:10.