It's tremendous that the government is developing a food plan. But we need to be more ambitious.

We should create new legislation - a 'Food Act' which clarifies the responsibilities of local and central government to ensure the population has access to healthy, affordable and environmentally sustainable food (just as government has responsibility to ensure access to housing). This would provide a focus and momentum for moving the plan forward.

We should encourage the emergence of more community based food organisations, building on the good work done by food co-ops and the 'food links' projects but with a broader membership and appeal.   Part of the role of such organisations would be to support and link with networks of local producers and to develop sustainable distribution systems for fresh produce.   They would also have a role in supporting better food choices, through for example volunteer community food advocates.

We should define more clearly what a good diet would look like for the people of Scotland and assess how much of that we could sensibly produce in Scotland.   This would include for example looking at our capacity to grow and mill bread quality wheat: the potential for increased fruit and vegetable production etc.   This should then inform our land use planning at national level and post 2012 our approach to agricultural subsidies. Land use planning would pay particular attention to urban and periurban agriculture and horticulture - for example with developers building on agricultural land having to put an equivalent area and quality of local land into community ownership for allotments/local food production.

We should establish a small cross-disciplinary Scottish Food Policy Centre, working within the framework of sustainable development.   We have excellent agricultural and soil research institutes, but these have to connect with public health, social justice and environmental justice.

We should reduce access to sugary drinks and confectionery Eg in schools, hospitals, government buildings, and discourage multipacks.   Thirty years ago, staples were sold in bulk while today multipacks tend to be high sugar and/or high fat non-essentials.  

We should become a fair trade nation, with public procurement leading the way.

We should provide assistance to all farmers to reduce greenhhouse gas emissions, if feasible through carbon trading or carbon credits - for example for reducing livestock and increasing tree cover.

We should re-examine the feasibility of treating food waste so it can be fed to pigs, and should also develop policies for safe and efficient use of other materials such as human sewage sludge, waste from parks and gardens, and poultry manure from intensive systems.

Perplexing times
Living on one planet means that dodgy mortgages in America affect house prices in the UK - and rice shortages in Vietnam mean that prices double here. It’s all connected - and it suddenly feels fragile. We can no longer take food for granted.

So what’s going on? There were poor wheat harvests in Australia and Canada last year, but overall world wheat production was only down 30 million tonnes or 5%. The real cause is the push to produce biofuels so we can keep driving more every year.

Huge government subsidies in the US mean 80 million tonnes of maize next year is for biofuel. By 2017, half the US maize crop will be for fuel, not food.

Misguided targets in the EU mean that new wheat to ethanol plants in England will use up to 2m tonnes of wheat in 2010 - more than twice the whole Scottish harvest.

And it gets worse. Rain forest is being cleared to grow palm oil for biodiesel. Britain’s new chief scientist, Professor John Beddington, has said cutting down rainforest to produce biofuel crops was “profoundly stupid”.

Higher demand means higher prices for all cereals. Rice has gone up by 96% in the last year, and wheat by 90%. Bad enough here, when food costs are 10-15% of our budget - but catastrophic in developing countries where food costs are 60-70% of income. And there is only so much land, and so much water for irrigation. Higher prices for wheat means more uncultivated land brought into production, more nitrogen fertiliser, more pressure on biodiversity.

It’s not bad news for everyone. Big grain farmers are back in the money after years in the doldrums. This month, agriculture conglomerate Cargill’s third-quarter profit rose 86 % to $1.03 billion. Every little price rise also helps the supermarkets.

But it’s bad news for the poorest people in the world. Cereal supplies are set to increase slightly in 2008, with higher plantings in many parts of the world and a better harvest in parts of Australia, but the ‘low income food deficit’ countries will be paying twice as much as two years ago for importing the same volume of cereals.

Food riots have been reported in Egypt, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Madagascar, the Philippines and Haiti.

There are two competing visions of the future. Proponents of the technical fix will call for GM crops and fertiliser to raise yields and will trust in the global market to sort out distribution. The alternative vision - where food production is sustainable and food distribution equitable - needs to become a good deal sharper.

£1,027.99 carbon offset payment to leadburn community woodland

As many of you are already aware (see last Pigmail) cows and sheep use their rumen to break down the grass they eat. As a result, they emit large amounts of methane - a greenhouse gas. Each of our cows is responsible for as much greenhouse gas in a year as a small car.

In Scotland, 12-14% of the carbon footprint comes from agriculture. Half of that amount is due to the use of artificial nitrogen. Organic farming prohibits the use of artificial nitrogen (we use clover to fix nitrogen), but we do contribute to global warming by keeping livestock.

In order to balance the damage we are doing, Whitmuir Organics have worked out that we should be contributing 10p/kilo for every kilo of butchered lamb, mutton and beef and 4p/kilo for every kilo of butchered pork (pigs don’t have a rumen but the production of pig feed also involves production of carbon dioxide).

In our first year of running our on-farm butchery, that amounts to a sum of £867.99. Together with the generous donation of 4 prints by Myrtle Ashmole, we have managed to contribute a total of £1,027.99 to the Leadburn Community Woodland to support their tree planting locally.

If you would like more information on how we have worked out the sums, please ask!

Jeremy Purvis MSP collecting the first carbon offset cheque to community woodland
A total of £367 was raised in our first three months trading. This included £160 from sales of prints kindly donated by Myrtle Ashmole.