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1. Introduction
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 discussion process has involved the following:
- A discussion paper: Choosing the right ingredients - the Future for Food in Scotland, which set out Government's vision for food in Scotland, i.e., that it should make the nation healthier, wealthier and smarter with production making communities stronger and consumption respecting the local and global environment. It also presented many of the main challenges and issues associated with food in Scotland. Stakeholders, individuals and organisations, were invited to respond to the document.
- A series of stakeholder events held around Scotland for views to be expressed, collated and communicated to Government. Thirteen of these were co-hosted by Government ministers or officials
- A blog on the Scottish Government website with video clips and commentaries which presented a variety of issues by prominent members of the food community and which could be responded to by an on-line response facility.
By the end of the discussion period in late April a total 441 of individuals and organisations had made written responses to Government, 80 people had responded to the blog, and 605 individuals with 315 organisations being represented were involved in the stakeholder events. In order to avoid unnecessary repetition of opinions expressed by the same respondents on different occasions ( i.e., in stakeholder meetings and when submitting a response to the discussion document), the results of the analysis of stakeholders' events is presented together with the analysis of the discussion document responses.
This report represents an analysis of these various responses, which has been undertaken by the Scottish Agricultural College ( SAC) with the assistance of Pareto Consulting.
The structure of the report is as follows. Section 2 explains the methods that have been used in the analysis. In section 3 an overview of the discussion process is provided, describing the nature and timing of the various events. Section 4 considers the evaluation of the written responses to the discussion document and in section 5 a similar analysis of the blog responses is carried out. In section 6 the policy implications of the analysis are presented and, finally, in section 7 conclusions on the national food discussion are drawn out. Supporting analysis will be published separately on the Scottish Government website.
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