Meeting of the Parliament 17 March 2016
Planning policy should play a role. I welcomed the fact that many of the initiatives that members mentioned in the debate originated from and have been supported by the Scottish Government. For instance, the issue of planning policy and allotments came out of a meeting that I had a few years ago with a Fife Council official, who told me the difficulties of securing land for allotments in Fife. We have now managed to change the legislation in Scotland to deal with those sorts of issues, and planning policy is at the heart of that.
Before I close I will touch on two or three other issues that members raised, the first of which is food waste. One of the ironies is that there are people who cannot afford or access good quality food at a time when, as a society, we waste a lot of food. That is a crazy place to be, given the impact that it has on our pockets, households and budgets, as well as the fact that it is bad for the environment and that it simply is a waste of a valuable resource. The Waste (Scotland) Regulations 2012, which this Parliament passed, mean that measures are in place to stop food waste going to landfill, and the Scottish Government has set Europe’s most ambitious food waste target: to cut food waste in Scotland by a third by 2025. We are leading Europe on tackling food waste.
Food waste is also a global issue. People talk about genetically modified food—which this Government does not support—as a way to produce more food and feed more mouths around the world. However, the United Nations reports that, as a planet, we waste around a third of the food that is produced in the world. About 28 per cent—if I remember the statistic correctly—of our agricultural land is used to grow food that is wasted. Clearly, to tackle food poverty and malnutrition around the world, we must tackle food waste at a global level as well as a Scottish level.
On tackling the issues at a European level, I agree that the common agricultural policy needs to be reformed. Indeed, if it was up to me I would rename it the “European food policy”, and there would be other dimensions within it.