ARIANE BURGESS: Supermarket shelves can empty in days – food supplies needs to be more resilient
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Holyrood Notebook by Ariane Burgess
With the loss of internet and electricity this winter in Shetland, everyone has been reminded of the importance of ensuring local resilience. What does it mean to be resilient?
It's about consistently meeting our fundamental needs for life. One need that is essential for life is our food.
Locally produced food is of critical importance for several reasons. First and foremost, this is about food security – ensuring that we can feed ourselves and our loved ones.
Most of us are likely to shop at the nearest supermarket, at least for some of our food. But we've all learned that supermarket supplies can run out in a matter of days. That's certainly not resilient.
By bringing food production closer to home, we not only have access to fresher food, securing the jobs of local food producers, we also reduce the amount of fuel used in transporting it – lowering the carbon emissions that push global temperatures up.
We're facing the rapid loss of our life-support system – and some of our farming practices contribute to that. Tweaking these practices would help to reduce climate change and restore nature. A significant tweak would be making locally grown food far more available.
What would bringing our food closer to home entail?
As little as two generations ago, people in north Highland could feed themselves from locally grown and produced food. The arrival of convenient supermarkets in our communities hastened the gradual move away from local food.
But are we mistakenly giving away our food security and contributing to rapid climate change and nature loss for convenience?
People's diets two generations ago may not have been as varied as today. But food producers are demonstrating that this potential is entirely possible to grow abundance locally. Courgettes, pumpkins, dwarf French beans, strawberries, cabbage, lettuce, potatoes, onions and asparagus could all be grown outdoors.
Broad and high hedges forming shelterbelts make all this possible. They provide shelter from the north’s harsh elements – strong winds, rains, and extreme temperatures – and increase the temperature of the non-windy side.
And we don’t have to miss out on delicious warmth-loving food like tomatoes and cucumbers. Those can be grown by using polytunnels.
Mark Dickinson is based on an Westray, Orkney and is showing us this is all possible – through simple innovation like his hedges.
The Scottish Government supports the agriculture sector with a range of payments amounting to over half a billion pounds. That's public money, yet agriculture produces 40 per cent of our carbon emissions and only 20 per cent of our food.
Scotland's agriculture system isn't joined to our food system.
What if we directed the payments to support farmers and crofters to produce the food we need in climate and nature-friendly ways?
This year we have that opportunity when the Scottish Government introduces the Agriculture Bill to replace the system used when we were in the European Union. This bill will set out continued support for farmers.
This is the opportunity for us to shift the emphasis to farming for food, people and the planet, and change practices to ones that work to regenerate and restore nature and reduce our climate emissions.
We need many approaches that work with nature. And we need to support innovators like Mark, who have the passion and commitment to show us a range of ways to contribute to our local food resilience.
This matter of resilience in our food system and bringing food closer to home is something we all need to be involved with and engage in a national and north Highland-wide conversation. Just how can we ensure a local food supply?
- Ariane Burgess is a Green MSP for the Highlands and Islands.
