The Scottish Government

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Executive summary

Background

On 7 November 2007 the Scottish Parliament resolved that Scotland should have a national food policy. In order to set the direction for a policy with wide national appeal, the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs and the Environment launched a national discussion in January 2008 and encouraged everyone in Scotland to be part of it.

The national discussion, analysed in this report, comprised the following initiatives:

1. a discussion paper: Choosing the right ingredients - the Future for Food in Scotland, which set out Government's vision for food in Scotland;

2. 13 stakeholder events held around Scotland for views to be expressed, collated and communicated to Government;

3. a blog on the Scottish Government website with video clips and texts which presented a variety of issues by prominent members of the food community and an on-line response facility.

Methods

The written responses, along with the findings from the stakeholder events, were analysed using two complementary methodologies. The first consisted of identifying the presence of broad topics (37 in total) in the responses, and ranking the topics according to the number of individuals or organisations belonging to a defined group ( e.g., consumers) that had cited the topic. The second methodology comprised a text analysis of the responses' content. This approach extracted the themes from the responses ( i.e., inductive analysis) and identified the frequency with which a phrase or keyword was used.

Findings

Response

By the end of the discussion period in late April a total of 441 individuals and organisations had responded to the discussion document, of which individuals ( i.e. consumers and individual businesses) provided 259 written responses, business organisations from throughout the food supply system made 61 responses, and non-business organisations provided 121 responses, giving a total of 182 responses from organisations.

The 13 stakeholder meetings, which were attended by Ministers and Government officials, gave rise to 12 records of proceedings. These indicated that 605 individuals attended them with 315 organisations being represented. Views were expressed on a wide range of topics.

There were 108 valid responses to the blog, which were analysed using the same text analysis technique as for the written responses.

Overall, the analysis revealed a very positive response to the discussion process, the Vision for Food put forward by the Scottish Government and the proposed introduction of a national food policy.

Breadth of topics

The responses to the discussion covered a very broad range of topics and a variety of perspectives on each one. The topics can be viewed in the context of the Scottish Government's 5 strategic objectives.

Wealthier and Fairer: issues concerning the labour market; various features of domestic and export markets including the marketing channels by which food is supplied; prices for producers and consumers; the interests of the primary producers, processors and distributors in the food and drink supply system; the interaction of food with local economies, communities and tourism; the need for fairness in food trade and the importance of food related research.

Smarter: issues relating to the education of children and adults; food labelling and traceability; and collaboration within food systems to achieve improvement in food supply and high standards of animal welfare.

Healthier: concerns relating to food safety and diet and nutrition; the promotion of food and healthy living; and the role of public establishments in providing good quality food.

Safer and Stronger: external factors affecting global food supply and Scotland's capacity for food production, as well as issues of food access for all parts of society and the assistance that is provided by community initiatives.

Greener: issues surrounding organic and environmentally friendly food production; food waste and packaging; local food and the distance travelled by food from the point of production to purchase and consumption; and the merits of people being involved in growing their own.

Top 10 topics

There were many different views expressed in relation to each of the above topics, and unsurprisingly, different stakeholders offered differing views. For example, consumer, education and environmental groups tended to focus on diet and nutrition, health, education and environmental concerns. In contrast, producer and distribution groups tended to focus on economic and competitiveness issues, whilst simultaneously being concerned about social welfare. Individual consumers, however, focussed on diet and nutrition, local food issues and education as their top 3 concerns. Taking all 441 written responses together, the top 10 topics were as follows (the percentage of total responses in which the topic was raised is shown in brackets).

Further insight into responses

The local ( i.e., Scottish or more locally defined) provenance of food is at the heart of the responses of both organisations and individuals. Health and diet, as well as education-related themes prevail in the individual responses, whilst the economic aspects of food production and distribution are underlined in the organisational responses. However, due to the high share of non-profit organisations representing societal interests and initiatives, as well as the broad nature of the policy discussion document itself, health and education themes are present across the whole set of responses.

The Blog

The blog with its 8 video clips and text presentations gave rise to 108 comments with 80 individuals being represented. Due to the nature of the triggers/prompts placed on the blog web site, the comments focused on: local food (41 occurrences); healthy diet (31); education at school (29); fish farming and its impact on environment (26); fast food (12); growing your own (11) and allotments (8). In summary, the blog comments complemented the results from the analysis of the written responses.

Issues for further debate and policy development by strategic objective

The breadth and volume of responses to the discussion show that food and drink touch the lives of everybody in Scotland - some because they work in the industry, all because they are consumers - and that a variety of different perspectives exist. Policy options to address the concerns identified cover a wide spectrum of possibilities, ranging from providing better information, to offering funding and other incentives, to appropriate regulation. In each case, various examples were suggested explicitly by respondents and/or inferred implicitly from the analysis of responses. Across the five Strategic Objectives, particular emphasis was placed on the need for further debate and policy development for certain topics, including:

Wealthier & fairer: the importance of a competitive and secure food & drink industry and the need to support quality domestic production through various mechanisms, such as public sector procurement.

Smarter: the role of adult and school education plus food labelling in raising awareness of issues such as health, diet and nutrition and the provenance of food and drink.

Healthier: the importance of reinforcing messages about diet and nutrition through various forms of health promotion and the potential for meals in public institutions to lead by example.

Safer & stronger: the importance of ensuring equitable access to food across society, including through greater use of local arrangements and securing supplies in the face of external factors.

Greener: the impact of food production and consumption on the environment and the role of different supply and demand arrangements for reducing this.

Conclusions

Overall the discussion process may be regarded as having engaged widely with Scottish consumers, business and other food-related interests, and it has evoked a very positive response from the people of Scotland with views on a wide range of issues being expressed.

Reconciling some of the different objectives and perspectives of "what" food and drink should be produced and consumed and "how" it should be produced and consumed may not be easy. Any National Food Policy will have to be multi-faceted, simultaneously addressing concerns as varied as public health, economic efficiency, environmental costs, distributional equity and security of supplies. Moreover, its implementation will necessarily involve a range of Government departments and non-government organisations, and it will need to achieve a greater degree of co-ordination than is currently displayed across separate but related policy areas such as agriculture, fishing, health, education and environment.

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