Rural Affairs and Islands Committee 03 September 2025
I will respond briefly. I have talked about some of the challenges in relation to the environment, nature and climate, but there are many other issues, certainly across the Scottish Food Coalition’s interests.
The sense is that many of those issues are picked up in the plan. There is a clear alignment with the right to food in anticipation of legal incorporation, and many of the population-related health outcomes that we are looking for, along with other targets and indicators, are picked up. However, we know that there are issues such as diet-related ill health and food inequalities.
The plan starts to tease out some outcomes and indicators in relation to those. It talks about things such as greenhouse gas emissions, food insecurity and diet-related illnesses, but there are quite big gaps around some of the big issues that need to be addressed—for example, members feel that there is insufficient content on the food environment. There are no indicators related to food deserts, the concentration of takeaways per head of population or fast food advertisements in physical and digital spaces. It is more silent, shall we say, on those issues. There is no mention of trying to track workers’ safety at sea and on land, for example, which would be a good thing, because we know that those industries have particular issues.
There is a vast array of challenges to be addressed across the food system. The plan starts to talk about some of them, but it is silent on setting indicators around some of them. Those gaps need to be looked at again.