Hansard

Shelter, warmth and food are the basic things that keep us alive. According to psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, just above those basic physiological requirements for life is the need for safety and freedom from fear. Food scares therefore affect some of the most basic needs that we have come to expect to be fulfilled in our modern, rich western society. A safe, secure supply of food is an essential prerequisite for a stable society, and Governments quite rightly place agriculture high up the list of priorities.

In this context, the recent horsemeat scandal has shocked us, not only because some horsemeat found its way into some products that are advertised as beef but because retailers and producers seemed to be entirely unable to guarantee the safety of their food, because they genuinely did not know where it had come from.

The meat processing industry is dominated by large companies selling meat as a commodity. In some cases, that is done with scant regard for the animal itself while it is alive, and little desire to ensure that it can be traced. Retailers and customers have no way of knowing where much of their processed food has come from, because tracing back through the convoluted supply chain would, quite frankly, boggle anybody’s heid.

That glimpse into the murky corporate meat industry is deeply unsettling and has led, as the Independent and Green amendment says, to some overdue attention. On the retail side, the sector in the UK is highly concentrated. The big-four supermarket firms control three quarters of our grocery market, which means that they can largely dictate the prices that are paid to producers, even if that puts people out of business. We saw a graphic demonstration of that last year, when dairy farmers across the UK had had enough. The supermarkets and other milk buyers pushed prices down and thousands of farmers were going to be forced into the red. Farmers could not find a fair price on the market, so they were forced to collaborate and protest. Short-term goals to prevent price cuts were achieved. The challenge that we face is to stop a small number of players dominating the market and jeopardising the rural economy and the welfare of animals, and putting people out of business unnecessarily.

Scotland’s food and drink policy should be focused on supporting small and independent businesses to play a greater role in our retail and supply chain. In the supply chain, that is not a seismic shift. The current food policy document recognises that the supply chain is dominated by small firms with one to 10 employees. Supporting those businesses must be the core of our policy. What the milk protests demonstrated is that to do that we need to support more diversity in the processing and retail sector.

We learned today that Diageo plans to restructure its global supply chain, risking thousands of jobs in Scotland. A sector that is based largely on small businesses provides resilience against large-scale job losses in such situations.

Of course, the picture is complicated and there are different issues for different parts of the industry. We are not selling a panacea, but it is clear that the dominance of a few prevents the maximum number of people in Scotland from benefiting.

I have mentioned the Soil Association’s food for life scheme in the chamber previously. The Government’s support for the scheme is welcome, with one in 10 schools in Scotland being assured of the provenance of the healthy food that they provide for school dinners. Procurement in East Ayrshire Council has led the way in Scottish schools. Others, such as those in Edinburgh, are attempting to catch up. The Soil Association is working with Currie and Buckstone schools, Clovenstone care home, St John’s hospital in Livingstone—which serves 1 million meals a year—and the University of Edinburgh’s Pollock halls, to get them buying local. Indeed, Pollock halls achieved the bronze award in January—my congratulations to those involved.

Our food policy should ensure that buying local is the default choice for public sector procurement and the easy choice for others. In Copenhagen, 75 per cent of food that is consumed in public kitchens is organic and locally sourced. We should make organic conversion and maintenance one of the Scotland rural development programme’s national targets when the consultation comes out in the spring. Among many other benefits, such a target would help to address serious concerns about the health of honey bees and other pollinators.

There is a huge amount to learn from the transition movement, which is equipping people with the know-how to reclaim spaces in the city, grow their own food, cook affordable and healthy meals and enjoy doing so. The community garden in the Royal Edinburgh hospital has become a huge success that is enjoyed by many groups. It is encouraging to see movement in NHS Lothian towards replicating that success, with Midlothian community hospital garden now open, too. For hospital staff, the links between food and health are easy to see. The gardens teach people what eating healthy, nutritious food can do to improve health and wellbeing.

The Independent and Green amendment talks explicitly of food policy playing its part in reducing obesity and improving health. Manufacturers have a huge amount of power over our diets and they should be doing more to cut down the amount of salt, fat and the additive content of processed meat products, among other products.

It is not fair to just encourage people to buy better-quality cuts of meat. That excludes large numbers of people who simply cannot afford to do so.

Top of the list on the excellent Fife diet’s manifesto is the soup test. Fife diet would like every child to leave school able to cook a cheap, nutritious bowl of soup. Who here could disagree with that?

Our food policy should have at its heart the provision of nourishing people in Scotland, not an export strategy. It should promote a food and drink sector based on small independent companies to ensure that production remains on a human scale and provides the resilience and sustainability that we need to have true confidence in our food again.

I move amendment S4M-05892.2, to leave out from “welcomes” to end and insert:

“recognises the scandal that has hit the food industry across Europe in recent weeks and welcomes the overdue attention now being paid to the nature of the modern globalised food chain; considers that the growth of an industrialised and corporately controlled food chain has contributed to a fundamentally unhealthy and unsustainable food culture; believes that Scotland’s food and drink policy must recognise this crisis and begin to break the domination of multinational companies in the food system, ensure that small and independent businesses play a greater role in Scotland’s food and drink supply chain, rebuild the knowledge and skills related to growing and cooking food that have been undermined in recent years and ensure that affordable, nutritious and locally-sourced food is available to buy across the country; recognises the important role that healthy food could play in improving Scotland’s health and reducing obesity, and congratulates the multitude of community-driven initiatives underway throughout the country promoting affordable, healthy and sustainable food.”

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