Rural Affairs and Islands Committee 03 September 2025
I want to go back to Emma Roddick’s point about whether there is a contradiction between food production and delivering for nature and the climate. I do not think that anybody in the Scottish Food Coalition would say that there should be. As I said, having healthy nature and a healthy climate is foundational to producing our food.
Many farmers out there are working in that way already, and we certainly acknowledge that. Having said that, we need an honest appraisal of what the current reality is. The situation is that nature is declining, and, in many cases, that is linked to agricultural practice—some of that is historic and some is on-going. Agriculture is the third-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in Scotland, and land use more widely is also very significant. We have to address those issues.
I mentioned that one of the failures of the plan is not setting out the state of Scotland’s food system at the minute. I appreciate that doing so would be quite a big task, and we do not necessarily have all the data, but it would have been great to see that in the very first plan.
Under the heading “The Vision”, the document says:
“The preceding section outlines the current state of Scotland’s food system, and offers an honest appraisal of the weaknesses in that system.”
However, it is three paragraphs long. That is not an honest appraisal of Scotland’s food system. When I say that we need an honest appraisal, I mean one that sets out the strengths of the system, the weaknesses, the opportunities and the threats. There is loads of great stuff happening already—none of us would deny that—but there are some really big issues to address. I do not think that we have had an honest start to the process that allows us to say where we want to get to, what better looks like and where we go from here.
10:45