 Fel ydych chi gweithio, iawn, a fawr i'r ddweud i'r 13 ddweud o ddweud i Gwyddoedd Rhywol, Fawr Ilyw i'r Ddweud i'r Ddweud i Gwyddoedd Rhywol yn y Cymru yn 2022. Felly, mae'r ddweud i'r ddweud i ddweud i ddweud i'r ddweud i Gwyddoedd Rhywol yn y Cymru, gyda'r ddefnyddio'r ddweud i ddweud i'r ddweud i ddweud i'r ddweud i Gwyddoedd Rhywol yn hynny, aetronic devices to switch them to silent. Ito'r ffordd item to decide whether to take item 4 in private. Our second item of business is an evidence session on petition PE1490, control of wild goose numbers, which has been lodged by Patrick Crowse on behalf of the Scottish Crofting Federation. This petition was referred to the committee following previous consideration by both the Public Petitions Committee and the Rural Affairs, Climate Change and Environment Committee in session 4 and the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee in session 5. The petition calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to address the problems created by increasing populations of wild geese in crofting areas as a master of priority. It reassesses its decision to stop funding existing goose management programme and assign additional resources to crop protection and adaptive management programmes to ensure that threat to the future of crofting is averted. I am pleased to welcome to the meeting this morning, petitioner, Patrick Krauser, and I hope that I have pronounced your surname correctly. As this is the committee's first consideration of petition, I would invite you to make an opening statement. That is great. Thank you very much and thank you very much everyone for allowing me to come in and support the petition. We have had the petition in existence for a number of years now. It was lodged in 2013. I would argue that we need to keep it live because things have not got any better. I know that some of you that are here, obviously your constituents, are saying the same thing to you. In 2013, across the crofting counties, they estimated there were about 8,000 grey-lagged geese. These are the Icelandic grey-lags. In Ewist alone now, there are 8,000 Icelandic grey-lagged geese. They are resident now. They were at one time just passing through, but they have become resident birds now. They are a problem throughout the year. Back in 2012, NatureScot or SNH at the time established some adaptive management projects. Adaptive management means that you do a bit of culling and then you take counts. It sounds like a very sensible way of doing it, but after five years of a very successful pilot, they decided to not continue with this. I could never understand the logic of that. Surely that's what a pilot is, is that you test something and if it works, then you do it. Whereas they tested it, it worked, so they didn't do it. Every year after they stopped the adaptive management, the budget reduced. It went down from just under 50,000 for the whole of the crofting islands, so that's Tydry and Coal, the Ewists and Lewis and Harris and Orkney. There was just below 50,000 that was used for the adaptive management projects. That was reduced every year until finally they decided in 2021 to not have any funding go to the control of geese at all, and NatureScot's role would simply be advisory. I just don't understand the logic of this whatsoever, because there didn't seem to be any plan in place for continuing the control. We went and I had a meeting with the minister and expressed extreme concerns about this, because it's at the point where crofters are giving up crofting because of the goose problem. This isn't an exaggeration. We use things like this in the press and we say that the geese are protected and crofters aren't, and crofters are an endangered species now, and so on, but the point is that in these islands, particularly Ewist and Tyry, we have this really unique macha environment and we have a lot of crops that are used, landraces that are traditional crops that you don't find anywhere else, and the seed is only available on the islands. Anyway, the minister then announced that she was going to put 50,000 or up to 50,000 towards goose management in the crofting areas. In her press release, she acknowledged that the macha is a very important environmental area and so on, and yet most of that 50,000 actually goes to Orkney, and Orkney doesn't have this same macha environment. I'm certainly not mocking Orkney. Orkney has got a really big problem with grey lags as well, so Orkney has in the region of 21,000 birds, and Lewis and the US have about 8,000 birds and Tyrys in the same sort of area, and so the Western Isles are getting 6,000 for the islands. This is per island to control this. Sorry, do tell me to sharp when I have to shut sharp, but I've only got a couple of minutes more. In Orkney, they're trialling a thing called corallig, where they round the birds up, so canoeists round multing birds up, and multing birds can't fly, and so they round them up into estuaries and then qualified people have to catch them and administer a lethal drug to kill them. So this works out at about £25 per bird, and in the US and Lewis we've had a shooting programme, and it costs about £8 per bird. So again, I'm quite surprised at the logic of this, that NatureScot has let a situation get completely out of hand to the point that they're having to use corallig, which no lethal method is nice, and the public perception of it, of course, isn't nice, and I have to add that Crofters and the marksmen that do this work really don't like it. But it's something that we have to do, because keeping the birds down to a tolerable level is the only way that we're going to manage this. The minister, in her interview, she said that we expect Crofters and geese to be able to live alongside each other, and we agree with this, but it will only work when they're manageable numbers. So about five years ago it was estimated that in Uist, Uist is a good example, that they could tolerate 2,500 birds. The adaptive management scheme actually got this figure down to 4,000, and so we were complaining then, but there's 8,000 now. So 6,000 pounds isn't going to even make a dent in this at all. Just to bring them down to 4,000, shooting them we're going to need 32,000. Sorry to throw all these figures at you. I'm sure Spice will have all the figures anyway, but it's just to get an idea of proportions, that we need about 32,000 to bring the numbers down to the very threshold of tolerability, and we've only got 6,000. So I would urge you please to keep the petition going, particularly because this year NatureScot carried out their five-yearly review of the management programme, so it's very timely to keep the petition going, if you would. We're not asking for a eradication of the birds, we're just asking for them to be reduced to a manageable level. So thank you very much for hearing my argument. Thank you very much Patrick, that's certainly given us lots of food for thought, and I know that there will be, if we look back, there's plenty of briefings in committee papers, which will inform us a lot of the background, but there is a lot of questions and quite a few members have got. I've got one in particular on it. You'd suggest that there's about five and a half thousand birds too many anews at the moment, which is very concerning, and if you're talking about 25 pounds ahead for humane slaughter, if you like, that just seems completely unreasonable. You also touched on there's now resident birds. Why is there now resident birds? What's happened to change that, rather than them being visitors that they're there full-time? What's happened and what's changed that these birds are now staying? That's a really interesting point, because I think most people put this down to climate change, and whether it's long-term climate change or whether we're just going through a phase where it's been warmer, that's all part of the argument, but the fact is that the climate has changed such that the birds are finding that the environment is suitable for the year-round now, so they stay. If I could just answer the first bit as well, please. The other thing that I meant to say was that this corralling involves using specialist organisations, so as well as paying just over three times the amount per bird to cull them, the money is going to specialist organisations, so it goes out of the area. NatureScot have said that they want to see sustainability in this, and at least if we're using public money and it's going to marksmen to keep the numbers down by shooting, then at least the money stays in the local economy. We've got quite a few members. Jim Fairlie is desperate to come in on one of your comments, and I'll move to Alasdair Allan. Patrick, thanks for the much you're coming in. This is fascinating, and from a farming perspective I absolutely get the reasons why you need to control numbers. The corralling bit absolutely blew my mind. I didn't realise it was happening, that we're paying people to go out and poison them. Perhaps the carcass is after their poison, I presume they get dumped. It kind of takes me on to the whole point that we were talking about beforehand. I'd like to ask a couple of questions, and Alasdair will probably come in and mop up what I miss. I see this as an opportunity in terms of the ability to be able to use goose meat as a product. Can you tell me first of all why there's no recreational shooting? I don't understand why we need to pay people to go and shoot geese, because people will pay to go out and shoot. It gives us a good quality source of protein. Why do we need government intervention at all? Why has this not become a micro-business for the places where goose numbers are large, because the marketing opportunities, as far as I can see, would be immense? That's a really good point, and it does seem logical. I think that's been part of the problem, is that NatureScot has assumed that it can be self-funding. The reason it's not is mainly because there are just too many birds. There's a limited market for what you can do with goose meat. The business that was dealing with this had a licence, and then there was a mess up with the re-licensing, which was NatureScot's fault. It had forgotten to ask the European Union for a licence. We need to be able to sell goose meat. Let's clear that one up for why we need a licence to sell goose meat. I'm not sure, but we do have to have a licence to sell goose meat. That's good, and I know of one business that is starting to use goose meat and doing things like making salami from it and so on. It's a limited market, and the numbers are just so huge that a small business can't deal with it. Is it a limited market in the sense that it's only ever been used or exposed in a very limited marketplace, i.e. it's only to be sold in the western isles? If you were to roll this out as the same as they did with the Orkney Gold beef, to me the market and opportunity for big supermarkets at a time where we've got potentially food shortages, we're talking about food shortages, we want to have a resilient food and drink sector, I just don't understand why that product can't be sold right across the UK with proper market and being done on it. I think you're right, I think it could. I think it's the differential between the existing numbers and the numbers of the market, the number of businesses that are trying to access the market. The market is too small and the numbers of geese are too big at the moment. Anything like this takes time to open a market up. In all of the initiatives that we have, like Scotch Lamb, Orkney Gold and so on, it takes a long time to establish that market and it takes a lot of money to get a market like that going because of the advertising and promotion and so on. Do you think that we are spending money than poisoning geese and sticking them in a hole? Yeah, absolutely. I agree. That is a whole line of question that we could enter. It just brought me in mind of my late dear friend, Alex Ferguson, who was the convener of this committee some years ago. I remember the dread on his face when it was geese or deer and I think in a lot of what you're saying you could replace the word goose by deer and where it was still. There's opportunities there. Just before we move on, Alex, a really quick one. Is the fact that you need a licence to sell geese, is that a consequence of there being a control system in place that's funded, or is this something that's general across the whole of Scotland? Is it specific to the aisles? No, it's a general thing. My understanding is that it's a European licence that we have to sell the meat from a species that has a restriction upon it. That's the point. Even though there's a general licence now to shoot grey-lagged geese, all geese are controlled in some way. I declare not so much an interest as an appreciation of what you're saying given that I live in a place where sometimes I look out my window and feel like I'm in a Hitchcock film at the number of grey-lagged geese landing around me. I wonder if you could maybe just explain a bit more to the committee about why this is a particular problem in areas which are crofting areas. Maybe not everyone appreciates the degree to which crofters are part-time agriculture and the pressures on their time. Can you say something about the scale of the task that would face either a crofter or a village in trying to deal on this without external assistance? It's quite a complex issue. Part of the problem is that shooting isn't done as much. Going back to what you said as well, there is sport shooting. Most crofters in the Western Isles are tenants, so the landlords retain the shooting rights. Shooting geese is a business for the landlords. Again, they just don't have the numbers of shooters. Crofters on the whole don't shoot. It's something that has changed over generations. In the past, it was fairly usual for crofters to shoot whatever they could for the pot. That has gradually diminished, so a lot of crofters don't have guns anymore. It's also very difficult to shoot geese, which is why it's a sport and why people do it as a sport, because it is actually very difficult to shoot geese. The marksmen have all said that over the years it's getting more and more difficult, because geese are quite clever and to the point of literally recognising the marksman's car. Moving on, as he or she comes down the hill, the geese take off because they know who it is. It is difficult, but there are some crofters that are shooting. In Lewis, for example, the local goose management group pays for the ammunition, but people are actually coming out as volunteers and shooting. There's a gathering of people at this time of year to go out and do some shooting. The answer that I can give to almost any question is that the problem is that we're completely overrun. The numbers are just way too high. That really is the stem of the problem. If we'd controlled them from five years ago or seven years ago, when we had the numbers at a more practical level, we wouldn't be in this situation and it's just gone completely out of hand now. On your point about cars, I have had people put to me that geese can recognise number plates, but the serious point in that is the one that you've just made, which is that there is a dramatic change in the number of grey-legged geese landing on people's crofts. I wonder if you could just say a bit, though, about what it is that grey-legged geese do when they land on a croft? The grazers, for one thing. Obviously, crofters are livestock keepers on the whole. The relationship between the cattle grazing the macker increases by diversity. If the cattle can't graze because the geese have already got the fresh grass, and the trouble is that they don't just graze the grass, they completely destroy it. They've got quite big feet geese, so they're plodding about flattening the grass, and they can produce an amazing amount of dung themselves, and cattle won't go and graze where geese have messed it. People are literally finding a field that they were using yesterday that they can't use the next day, because during the early hours a flock has come down and completely taken the field out of use. The consequence is huge. The crofter thinks that he's got this amount of grazing for this number of animals, and then suddenly it's halved literally overnight. He's got to either buy feeding or he's got to start selling animals quick. This is an example of an issue where agriculture and environmentalists are actually on the same side. You've described the situation about the macker landscape, and the need for that landscape to be grazed, to be a habitat. Is there a kind of common cause here? There is absolutely there's a common cause. RSPB, for example, are probably the biggest environmental organisation and have the most concern about the welfare of the birds, of course, but they agree with us, and they in fact ran a project themselves to bring the goose numbers down. This whole point about the environment and this close relationship between the way crofters manage the land and the fact that it enhances the environment. Not that long ago, crofters, and the way crofters manage the land, were looked on as a bit old-fashioned, and oh well, that will change. They'll catch up. Of course now, particularly all the emphasis on the twin emergencies of climate change and biodiversity loss and the fact that we hosted the COP, there's very much a spotlight on the environment now. Quite right, of course. I believe that the way crofters have been managing the land is now being recognised as a sustainable way forward. We will lose these old varieties of grain, for example, because the seed is only produced on the islands, and once it's gone, it's gone. Thank you. Just before we move on to Anna, are you aware of any biodiversity research that's been done on the island? The emphasis on this petition has been about protecting livelihoods, really, with the grazing and the sustainability agriculture. The other direction to take it, as you've clearly set out, is about the marker and whatever, but the biodiversity loss, when you move from a sustainable number of geese off and you've got twice the number or three times more geese than even agriculture can deal with, never mind looking at biodiversity. Has there been any work being done to look at the biodiversity loss attributed to geese? There has been some, I would argue, not enough, and surely this is something that we employ NatureScot to do. They've got the researchers, so they could be producing the evidence and showing geese impact on the environment. Thanks, convener, and hello Patrick. Thank you so much for coming to give evidence today. I just really appreciate what you've said up to this point. It is a very interesting conversation that Jim Fairlie has initiated around feeding people. I'm a regional MSP to cover most of the areas and issues, the areas where geese are an issue, and it's interesting because I live in Murray where geese are shot on a nature reserve, and the local people don't want that to happen. As Jim said, people pay to come and do that shooting, and they come from Europe to do that at times. So there's something here that we do need to look at overall. I've got a few questions. You've answered quite a few of mine, but there's now £50,000 back, is that right? That's been reintroduced, but it's been split and Orkney gets the most because of the way in which they're culling the geese. I think it's mainly due to the fact that they're trialling the corralling. I also wonder how much it's... Well, also Orkney have got three times the number of birds. They've got three times the problem, so I can understand that as well. And I don't know whether there's any fact in that there is definitely more money spent on areas that are producing commercial grain. So in the US, crofters tend to be just producing animals and small amounts of traditional grains. So it's a very small enterprise, whereas Orkney, of course, is producing a commercial beef product and producing a lot of grain for feed. So I don't know how much that affects decisions that are made on where the money is going to be spent. I mean, sorry to go on, I'm answering more than you asked, but it can't help but strike you that for the other protected species, which tend to affect islands like Islay, how Islay, of course, produces whisky, whisky is a commercial success story for Scotland. And they are a different goose that is the problem. And they're more strictly controlled. And so farmers have paid compensation. So the point I'm trying to make is that the budget for the crofting areas is 50,000. And the budget for the other agricultural commercial areas that have goose problems is 1.1 million. And I know NatureScot would probably argue that it's because they are a more protected species. But I just asked the question, is the fact that there are commercial interests here, does that play a part in how they decide to spend the budget? Thank you for that. And you're welcome to expand your answers beyond my questions. So I would be interested in hearing what would be proportionate, reasonable for a quota on the amount of geese, grey-lag geese, let's stick with that, that could be called each year, I think. Well, as I said in the beginning, in Uist, for an example, the crofters, there was a lot of work done on this in the adaptive management programme. So it was a really useful programme. And they estimated that in Uist, if they had 2,500 birds, then they can live happily alongside each other. And that sort of proportion would probably be for all of the crofting areas, if you can bring them down. I mean, I can remember a time, probably around the petition and pre-petition, where Orkney was only just starting to feel that geese were a problem. People were starting to say, yeah, it's a bit of a problem. Now it's completely out of hand, and Orkney farmers are giving up. We had the National Goose Forum the other day, and the Orkadian representative said that he personally knows of farmers that are giving up farming in Orkney because of the geese. So you described at the beginning the process that NatureScot went through over a period of time, and then at some point after five years they stopped. So now we've got this increase of birds, and we want to get to, so we're using the example of Uist, so we want to get to 2,500 birds. What will we do, how many years would that take over time to get to that place, that number? I think the answer is that we really need to get the numbers down as soon as we possibly can. I'm not an expert on culling geese, so I don't know what is realistic, whether we can reduce them by 2,000 every year until we get to that sort of figure, or whether, you know, if we made a bigger effort, whether we could reduce more of them per year, say 3,000 a year, I think it's going to take a few years to get the numbers down again. And then another question I have is about the ammunition used for shooting, so I'm aware that there's different kinds, and obviously if we were going in the trajectory that Jim has introduced, which is food, then I know that RSPB are keen to see lead ammunition not being used, so have you got any thoughts on that? Not really, I'm not that technical, I don't shoot personally, so I can understand the need to not use lead if we're going to use the meat for going into the human food chain, of course. My understanding is that the stainless steel shot costs more, so it just means that the costs are going to go up a bit, but it's a proportional thing. If it means that you can then start using the meat, then it makes sense to pay that bit more for a steel shot. I think that Jim Fairlie would make in the comment that the direction of travel is away from lead shot, that's certainly our understanding. I'm going to move to Rachel Hamilton and then Jenny Minto. Obviously, with the pressures on food security and what you said about some of the traditional barley and cereal crops that are being grown in the islands, do you not think that this should be considered as an emergency by this Government? Absolutely. I can only agree with you that this is an emergency. We're going to see people that can produce food going out of business quite quickly from this, I think. You mentioned that crofters are giving up. What do crofters do and what happens to the land if they're not managing the land? It lies unused, unfortunately, so there are quite a lot of examples of crofts lying neglected now. It's not just entirely because of the geese, there's a problem with neglected crofts anyway. Lastly, NatureScot says that they want to balance between controlling the geese and mitigating the impacts on agricultural production. Do you have any examples, Patrick, of what NatureScot would consider if, for example, a crop had been trampled by geese, a crofter had to then pay for more seed to risot and go through the whole process again and, in fact, lose that crop potentially? What do you think that they consider a balance and would you consider that crofters would be content with compensation because they have to put up with the geese? I think that it's not really about compensation, to be quite honest. I don't want to digress into the white-tailed sea eagle, but the argument has been the same there. The crofters have said that we need to protect our crops from eagles and geese, and they're asked, is this a compensation thing? Throughout, they've always said that this isn't about compensation. We don't grow crops to feed geese. We grow crops because we grow cattle and that's what we're trying to do, and we produce some of the best cattle and the best beef that's available. We have the best environment to do it. We have this very unique ecosystem going, so destroying the ecosystem and just saying, okay, there's some money isn't the answer. It's about maintaining the balance. In the national geese policy, there are three primary pillars. The whole policy is based on conservation of the species, on crop protection and on value for money because it's public money. It's just completely out of balance. There's been too much emphasis on the conservation. I and the SCF and crofters aren't anti-conservation at all, quite the opposite in fact, but the emphasis has been too much on conservation of species. Crop protection always seems to take the last consideration, so they'll look at conservation and they'll look at value for public money. I have to say, I don't think they look at value for public money very well in some of the examples that I've given. Crop protection always seems to end up last. For coming today, I represent Argyllun butte, so I recognise the goose issue on a number of the islands that I represent. As well, I'll guess you're correct as Whiskey. It's also home to about 40,000 over-the-winter barnacles in Greenland-White-Fronted, and farmers and very importantly, crofters as well, so it's the whole range of users. I want to go off on a slight tangent, perhaps. I'm certainly aware driving round Argyllun butte. There's a vast increase in Canadian goose numbers as well, and I'm interested. Given the increase that there's been in the gray lag geese since the petition was first brought in, how other things have changed around goose numbers, and I'm thinking specifically of the Canadian ones, which are not indigenous species to here? I don't know about the Canadians on the western isles, but I know that the greenland barnacles are probably in the last five years. That's the interesting thing with these, is that the numbers changed very quickly. Five years ago barnacles probably weren't being considered much of a pest at all, and now they're a very big pest. I know we keep going on about the gray lags. Again, it's just because of the huge numbers involved, but barnacles are becoming a serious problem as well. In some of your earlier answers, you've talked about the five-year review that's coming up. How do you plan to get involved with that, or what conversations you've had with NatureScot to date? They haven't actually started the review, so we attend the national goose forum. They said that they'll be launching the new review fairly shortly and will be contacting all the stakeholders and asking for evidence and opinion. I'll be lobbying you people, I'm afraid, and asking for your support. Members, unfortunately we're running tight of time, but I'm going to go to Beatrice Wishart and then Karen Adam. It's just one quick question to Patrick, and it's good to see you here today in person. I noticed from a report on the BBC from three years ago that a meet from Wild Geese Shot and Orkney was to go on sale across Scotland for the first time. I wonder if you had any knowledge of how that went? I don't. I think it's been fairly successful, but again my understanding is that it's all very, very small scale and can't address the problem. NatureScot admit that the selling meat isn't going to answer the problem that we have at the moment. As Jim was saying, longer term there's all sorts of potential, but right now we're completely swamped, and small amounts of meat being sold doesn't really make any difference at all. So would you describe it as a crisis? Yes, absolutely, absolutely. I know that this issue is very specific. A certain species of bird and the landscape biodiversity is very specific to the area, but have you looked across the world to see if there are any similar circumstances in relation to solutions for this and best practice? I recognise that the petition is calling on us to help, but often times it's helpful if you have anything in mind yourself for a solution. NatureScot have partners in other countries that they talk to about goose management, but it's more from a conservation aspect, so I personally don't really know that much about goose management as management of a pest in other countries. I would say that on the geographic limitations in Scotland those areas are expanding really rapidly, and so Shetland now is starting to see a goose problem. Even, well Beatrice will know this, but even in the last five years say probably even less it's turned from Shetland as being able to look at the problems elsewhere in Scotland with sympathy to now getting up in the morning and seeing the geese all over their land as well. I know that we do talk about the western isles a lot. This is where the problem really started, but it is spreading, so it's right across the northern isles now and the mainland, so in Lochaber and so on there are problems very similar. They just don't have the numbers yet, but they're coming. Thank you, and very, very, very finally I could talk to you all day. There are tensions between landowners and tenant sheet farmers in terms of grazing deer, and there is an agreement where landowners have to control certain numbers of deer. What responsibility do landowners have in protecting the grazing and the cropping of tenant crofters as part of their responsibility as a landowner? They don't have any legal responsibility to protect crofters' crops. Some landlords are quite good, so Storys Ewys, for example, which is a community landlord, are very involved in the management of geese, and the relationship between the crofters and the community landlords all across actually is very good. Private landlords, I'm not here to not private landlords at all, but they have other business to attend to. Maintaining numbers of geese, like maintaining numbers of deer, is part of their business plan. But it's not sufficient at the moment? No, not at all. Thank you, Patrick. I thank you very much for your informative and measured contribution to supporting your petition. We found that fascinating this morning, and, once again, I probably just raised more questions in members' minds than answered them. Our paper members set out suggestions for next steps. I propose that we do move to continue the petition and look at it further. I suggest that we write to the Scottish Government and NatureScot for an update on adaptive geesh management projects and request details of the timetable and likely scope, given that it's almost 10 years since the petition was raised. In light of the further evidence that we've had today of the potential impact on biodiversity, the change in the living patterns, or the habitat of the geese, we also need to ensure that we are aware of what the scope of the review will be, given the changes in circumstances. I propose that we consider the matter, again, on receipt of a response from the Scottish Government. Members agreed? Thank you. We are now going to have a brief suspension. I suggest that we suspend until 10.25, and we'll move on to the agenda item on Ukraine. Our third item of business today is an evidence session on the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on food supply chains in Scotland. I welcome to the meeting our panellists who are contributing remotely. We have Elspeth MacDonald, the chief executive officer from the Scottish Fisherman's Federation, Professor Alan Matthews, the Professor Emerit of the European Agriculture Policy at Trinity College Dublin, Dr Mike Rivington, the land use systems modeler from the James Hutton Institute, Stephen Thomson, the agricultural economist from Scotland's rural college and Scott Walker, the chief executive officer of the National Farmers Union of Scotland. We are not going to take up opening statements. We are going to move straight to questions, and I'll kick off. I just want to go round the panel and ask how Scotland's food production and sectors are being directly affected by the Russian invasion. I would like to ask you to what extent the impacts are thought to be a direct result of the invasion, or compounding existing challenges? We'll start with the top left on my screen, which is Scott Walker. Thank you very much, convener. You're quite right to say that a lot of the problems that were currently facing existed before the war in Ukraine. The war in Ukraine is compounding a lot of existing issues that have already happened in the food chain. The big impact of the war in Ukraine is the impact on feed prices and fuel prices. If I explain about the impact on fuel prices first, that is the fundamental cause to the problems that we will see in the supply chain, which will ultimately lead to a reduction in productive capacity, unless there is intervention here in Scotland, both at the farm level and potentially in the production level in the manufacturing sectors. In essence, because of the rise in gas prices, what you've seen is a very substantial increase of doubling and trebling, in some cases, in fertiliser prices. Ultimately, fertiliser is what depends on the productive capacity of agriculture. What we see immediately is that, if I use the poultry sectors and the pig sectors as an example, they've had an immediate increase both in their fuel costs and in their feed costs, which has exacerbated, which was already a loss that may be making situation in the pig sector even further. Just now, every pig producer in Scotland will be losing around £50 on every pig that they sell, which has already led into a contraction in the pig supplies coming from Scottish farms and jeopardising the processing sector in Scotland. We see the same issues without going into the detailed figures in the poultry next sector just now, which fundamentally undermines our ability to produce. If I look at the livestock sector, because of the long production cycles in livestock, cows have been put to the bull and calves already in production. Those animals will come through, but what individuals in that sector are looking at now is what is going to happen about the production of winter keep this year. If they don't use the fertiliser, as appears to be the case from the anecdotal evidence that we are getting back from farmers, there will be less winter keep. Therefore, at the back end, we could see quite a sizable number of cattle being reduced in Scotland. Before we move on to our panel members, you talked about decisions that farmers are taking just now. Are there any irreversible consequences of decisions that have been taken now? You talked about the bull being put out or potentially less ground being put down for wheat or barley or re-sewn as grass. Do you see any evidence that there are irreversible impacts on production towards the end of the year because of the decisions that are being taken now? Yes, it is a timing thing. What we are seeing just now is how we use the pig sector as the example just now. The pig sector is contracting at this moment in time. I have spoken to pig farmers who are reducing the size of the herd and some individual pig farmers who are in the process of winding down the business and going out of business during the next few months. That will ultimately lead to less pigs coming to market, so that will be felt during the course of this year. Of eggs, what you have is a 16-week cycle for eggs. If the birds are there just now, they will be seen through to the end. However, what farmers are doing is looking at putting less birds in the future or reducing the number of hen houses that they are occupying. They will be the immediate effects that we will see. In terms of grain and livestock, what you are going to see is the effects towards the end of this year, but more likely coming to take into impact in 2023 and 2024. My big concern is that the retail sector has not woken up to the fact of securing domestic supply and production here. We are not really seeing the signals for many of those produce to avert those decisions, so confidence is very low just now in the farming sector. I am sure that we will come back to that topic and further questioning. Again, thank you very much for the invitation. I am obviously the outsider on this panel, and what Scott has said seems to make a lot of sense to me. What I would perhaps nuance slightly is that the picture is not a dark one overall. It is clear that different sectors within farming will be affected differently. There has been a dramatic increase in production costs, fuel, fertiliser and so on, but there has also been a dramatic increase in some producer prices, in particular for wheat and other grains. Arable farmers will look forward to quite a profitable season. Pasture-based livestock farming, milk prices rising, which will at least partially compensate for the higher production costs. The focus is very much on the animal feed and the intensive agricultural sectors, as Scott has highlighted, but that is just a part of the overall Scottish agricultural sector. I suppose that, as politicians, there are conflicting objectives. There are broader issues of how to address the impact of higher grain prices on global food security, not just in Ukraine itself, but also in low-income countries that are highly dependent on food imports, and how to use the opportunity to progress Scotland's ambitious goals in the green transition, both in terms of reducing fossil fuel dependence in agriculture and encouraging changes in consumer purchasing and eating habits. Good morning. Thank you very much, convener. I would like to point out that something that Professor Matthews was saying is that there may be winners and losers in this situation in that there are some people who have taken up approaches towards agroecological production systems and have lower dependence on fertilisers, and therefore are a little bit independent from the impacts on fertiliser costs, but they could also benefit from the higher grain prices and the benefits of the agroecological approaches that some farmers are practising is that they also then also have net zero target benefits and biodiversity target benefits. I think that what we are likely to see is a range of impacts and what this situation may well be is an opportunity to support the transitions that the Scottish Government are working towards, towards more environmentally-formed forms of farming as well. From my perspective, whilst there are obviously severe impacts across some parts of the food production sectors, that is also an opportunity as well, thank you. Thank you very much, convener. I would like to thank some of my colleagues across SEC Consulting for feeding some of the information in. From the farming perspective, a lot of this is to do with whether or not you have pre-purchased fertiliser. I know a lot of the cropping sector will have forward contracts and will already have stock of fertiliser, less so in the livestock sector, and the same goes for feed. Those producers that are locked into a contractor, those contracts are probably ending in spring, and they are suddenly faced with very sharp rises in feed prices and fertilizer prices. Those are the things that will dramatically impact on production decisions. I am just reiterating what Scott was saying. Those decisions are already in situ, so the anecdotal evidence that we are hearing is that people are using the very high cull prices just now and are probably dispersing of some of their animals that are not producing well or perhaps making the decision, as Scott suggested, not to put cows back to the bull this year and to sell cows in the back end. Those are real decisions. Those are things that are happening on the ground, and those are things that will ultimately impact on the processing sector and the downstream sector and upstream in terms of the supply side. It is not just affecting farmers that can have long-term impact across the wider population. Then you think about the whole thing about consumer prices. We are seeing inflation just continuing to rise. We forget that quite a few of our products from the farming sector are quite elastic. That is a small price that leads to a large decrease in consumption. We are yet to see that, so we are continuing to see the impacts of Covid in terms of the food sector and the fact that quite a lot of us are still working remotely, although I am in an office. That whole sector is not really back to normal, so it is right that you said at the start that this whole thing of part will have partly to do with EU exit, partly to do with Covid, but an awful lot of the decisions just now are to do with price increases. I have a question specifically for you. Can you set out what the Scottish Fishermen's Federation's views are on the impact of the Scottish Government's withdrawal from engagement with the Russian Federation with regard to international fisheries negotiations? Thank you, convener, and thank you for the opportunity to speak to the committee today. There is certainly an indirect impact on fishing, as well as some of the direct impacts in terms of fuel prices that the other contributors have spoken about. The exclusion of Russia from some of the international fisheries negotiations is broadly supported, and it will have a differential impact on different parts of our fisheries. I think that on our shell fisheries and our commercial fisheries that won't have such an impact, but it will be significant in terms of some of our pelagic stocks, so things like our mackerel stock, where Russia is one of the partners in what's called the coastal state negotiations. There are discussions under way at the moment about finding new sharing arrangements for our mackerel stocks, which are technical, and I won't go into all the detail of it here. Russia is excluded from those stocks, but there is support in the Scottish industry that it is right that Russia is excluded from those stocks, although we recognise that it will have implications for the pace at which the stocks can progress. In the same way as my terrestrial counterparts on the panel have been talking about some of the direct impacts of the war in Ukraine, certainly the impacts of fuel costs on our industry are significant impacts on profitability. Echoing some of the comments that Scott Walker made about parts of the industry already being vulnerable and that being exacerbated by what we are seeing now in terms of fuel costs. It is also worth mentioning the importance of Ukraine as a market for some of our products. Again, it is very important for our mackerel industry that, in excess of 20 per cent of Scottish mackerel exports, would have gone to Ukraine before the war. As far as the Shetland fleet was concerned, that would be around the 30 per cent mark. Obviously, that industry has to find new markets for a significant proportion of its production. Of course, we are facing a challenging time in regard to our labour and workers across the fishing and agricultural industries. The impact has been challenging to put it mildly. What impact the war in Ukraine has had on the issue? If we are looking at a more complex situation now that we may need to incorporate into on-going solution finding, can I start with Elspeth, please? I come back to the point that I made about the export of our mackerel to Russia. That was a very direct, sorry, to Ukraine. That was a very immediate impact. Scotland used to export a lot of mackerel to Russia when Russia needed Crimea. In 2014, there were sanctions put in place there, and that trade stopped. Since then, a significant proportion of our mackerel product has gone to Ukraine. Obviously, there is still a demand in Ukraine for people there, despite the terrible circumstances that they are in. They still need to eat, but there are real practical problems in getting product there, and practical problems for these companies in distribution and paying for it. The pelagic sector has had to adjust quickly to try to find some new markets for that product. In the broader sense, what the situation in Ukraine has shown is just how vulnerable our industry is to geopolitical shocks. Whether that is as a consequence of the huge increases that we have seen in fuel prices and the direct impact that is having on parts of our fleet is a vulnerability to those external factors that you have no control over. That makes us focus much more on the importance of our domestic food security and ensuring that we have short- and long-term policies in place to ensure that we are able to support our domestic food production. I think that there is much that we would see in the short and the long-term that we think would be helpful in terms of how we can do that to make sure that we continue to have our ability to produce food domestically and that we can support our domestic food security. What are the implications for farmers who are looking for seasonal workers? Is there any implications for Ukrainian workers that we have here already? Yes, thank you. If I just start off with just the Ukrainian workers, many farms in Scotland would have had a lot of Ukrainian workers in the past predominantly saw through a field vegetable sector. I know of some farms in Scotland where that would have been up to above 80 per cent of their workforce. First and foremost, for those farmers, they have strong relationships with a lot of those individuals who have worked on them. I know that they have been in contact with those individuals just to find out how they are and how they are family are dealing. We cannot separate from the tragic human impact that people are feeling just now. In terms of Scottish food production, we are heavily dependent on seasonal workers coming into this country. It is too early in the season as yet to say exactly what the impact will be. We were expecting before the war in Ukraine because of the policies on immigration that the UK Government has put in place that it would be difficult to source labour and we only see the war in Ukraine making this issue even more difficult at this point of time. We know that there will be very unlikely to be any men from Ukraine who will be able to come across to work here because of the restrictions that, understandably, have been put in place. There is concern that, should any women from Ukraine come across here, they will need some emotional support. Again, quite understandably, it would be concerned by family that are back in Ukraine and I know speaking to the likes of RSAPI and others that the industry is looking to see what sort of help and support they could be put in place. In short, it is a bit early to tell, but we expect that it will be a really tough season. We know that, if we look at the vegetable sector, individual growers have already decided to cut back production between 15% and 25% because they have concerns about not being able to source labour. If they are not able to source labour because of the high cost of production in those sectors, they will not go through with that production schedule, with that huge uncertainty to source. I think that, both short-term and long-term, we really need to address the seasonal workers scheme for this country and see what we can do to encourage more workers in. I pose the question to Stephen Thompson, please. It is a really interesting dilemma that a lot of people have. Scott mentioned that the relationship with Ukraine and the high dependency on Ukraine for seasonal workers was pre-Brexit. That dependency was on Bulgaria and Romanian workers. The situation has changed because we used to source from within the EU, and then, obviously, leaving the EU, those workers no longer came. We are now sourcing largely from where we were, sourcing largely from Ukraine. Even with the seasonal workers scheme, there was an awful lot of fields left in the field. People were losing an awful lot of their crop in the past two or three years. Pre-Ukraine, that has been a problem. With the war in Ukraine, it is just adding to the issue. We are talking about food security, and one of the things that we probably need to do more often in this country if we want to address domestic production is to grow more of our own veg and our own fruit sources. It is the thing that we cannot actually pick because we have not got a workforce. We drastically need to try and work out solutions, either local solutions or more international solutions with regards to workforce or technological solutions. There are robotics now working in raspberries in Portugal. They are in an infancy and they are not a short-term solution. They are unlikely to be a long-term solution for some of the sectors. Those are big issues. Farmers are businessmen, and they are having to make really hard decisions with regards to what they put in the ground or what decisions they are making about a cow that is going to a calf in a year's time. Those are decisions that they are making now that impact on future food production. It will be interesting to see what the spring plantings are with regards to some of the field veg this year, and that should be monitored very closely. Thank you very much. The thing that none of us have mentioned is the lack of workers in the processing sector, which is significantly impacting on the fruit and ability to process, particularly in the livestock sector. If you think about it in the packing sector for potatoes, all of those things have traditionally been done by overseas workers. Somehow we need to build an industry of a workforce from local workers to try and fill that void. Absolutely. That is particularly true in the fish processing sector. Can I pose the question to Professor Alan Matthews, please? I think that on this particular question, I really do not have any expertise to offer. I think that you have heard some very helpful insights from the previous speakers, so I am going to pass, if I may, on this question. No problem at all. Thank you. Thank you, Professor. I know that this will sound like a very premature request, but I am already very aware that we are going to be tight for time. We have quite a few questions to get through. Can I ask members to try and direct their questions at the panel members that they think that they can most fully answer the question? If any of the panel members, if there is nothing covered to indicate to come in to give their view rather than to go through the whole panel, that would certainly help. Karen, did you have a further question to finish off? No, that is fine. I will pass and let somebody else in. Thank you. I have a supplementary question on the situation of Ukrainian seasonal workers. I am going to direct the question to Scott Walker and then possibly Stephen Thompson. You may not have an answer to that, but there was a recent Guardian article that reported that hundreds of Ukrainians are living and working informally in Britain after escaping from farms. Many claim to have been subjected to conditions of modern slavery. I do not know whether that is necessarily in Scotland, so I just want to say that. One Ukrainian woman explained that she worked on a cherry farm where they were not allowed to wear gloves, causing their hands to bleed and their skin to peel off. She said, I thought that our rights would be well protected in the UK, but that has not happened. The article went on to explain that seasonal farm workers are not eligible for the two main government Ukrainian refugee schemes because they left the farms and were not working on them, so they have fallen in a gap. I am wondering what we can do to protect the rights of seasonal workers in general and give those Ukrainians who have left jobs as seasonal workers a swift and guaranteed route to staying legally in the UK. I realise that that might be out of the scope of your knowledge, but I am just interested to hear your responses on that. I have certainly never heard of any of those scenarios in Scotland at all. I know of individual farmers who have long-standing relationships with the Ukrainians and have made contact with them through the official title resettlement scheme to try to help and give them accommodation across here, not to provide work, but to provide accommodation, because there is a separation there. It has proved very difficult to get all that connected, so that is something that does need to be simplified. As I understand it and you touched on it, for those who come through that settlement scheme, they are not allowed to work on farms in Scotland or working in this country. If that could be easy, I think that that could be helpful. I think that the farming sector, as a whole in Scotland, has a very, very good reputation for its seasonal workers. Most farms in Scotland rely on returning workers to a very high percentage, so it is not a new set of workers coming in each year. If you look at the farms who have an extremely high percentage of returning workers, that would indicate to me that the facilities on the farm and how they treat the workers must be very good for those workers to return here in Scotland. Thank you very much, Scott, for your response. It is really heartening to hear that there is a good relationship between farmers and that it is not a one-off, but that there is actually a real relationship and not just a transactional business approach. I am complete there. Thank you, convener. You are as well to stay on the screen, because this is going to be entirely directed to yourself, and Stephen Thomson might want to pitch in. I am just going to first of all touch on the impact of rising input costs, which we have already discovered and already talked about. What do we need to do to mitigate the rising costs and DEC opportunities in that? I am specifically going to talk about a business that is in my constituency, earn side energy, and what they are doing is taking food waste and their processing it down and turning it into liquid fertiliser. Farmers around me are actually using that product right now, and it is about 80 per cent cheaper than trying to buy food at current prices. What are the opportunities? We also have the issue about slurry storage. We have far too much slurry needing to be stored. How can we take those two issues and turn them into opportunities? I raise really good points, Jim. I think that these would tend to be what I put into the medium-term category in terms of what the industry could do in medium-term to move forward. I start off with renewable energy on farms. A lot of farmers already have their own renewable energy generation on farms, whether that be wind turbines or solar panels. The problem with that has often been connection to the grid and getting planning permission, so things that could be sped up to allow a greater investment in that area on farms to become more self-sufficient in energy would be helpful. In terms of fertiliser usage, there are a couple of things there that could be done with immediate effect. I know that the Scottish Government has been looking at what is called the tip track 1 of the national test programme, which would be looking at a soil sampling on farms and nutrient management planning on farms. I think that the more information and help and assistance could be given in that area, that would allow farmers to use the nutrients that they currently have in the most efficient way possible and to the most appropriate way in the individual fields. I think that that is a good thing. Another issue that we have found in the past when we have looked at using non-traditional fertiliser usage is the attitude of the supply chain and some of the attitude of the supply chain. Again, perfectly understandable has been about resistance to use these non-chemical derivatives. Working, as we have done in the past, and what we have done with the likes of Sepa Food Standards Scotland, trying to give that confidence to the supply chain to use these products would be helpful. You touched on what is a huge issue just now for us about the new rules on slurry storage that have just come in and where farmers are facing substantial investments to be put in place on farm. Those substantial investments, if put on farm, would allow slurry to be used better in some circumstances, but they do not make economic sense for a lot of farmers to do that. Some flexibility on those rules and some help with investment on farms to comply with those rules would help to provide those long-term resilience measures. An opportunity for collaboration on the use of slurry, not just having to use it on your own farm but using it in your areas. You have small localities that are working together. That is where we can look at machinery rings, small local co-operatives and bringing together farmers in groups to work in that area. You are looking at both investment in storage and investment in kettle of applying it to fields. More than that, we can encourage and help to support farms to take those initiatives. I know that it would be an appetite for a lot of people out there to do it. With that situation, unfortunately, that is where a lot of those farms, the margins that they are experiencing just now, is very low to non-existent. Therefore, for them to make that investment is difficult, but also important is to give them the confidence to make that investment so that they can see a long-term future for food production. I am going back to what I said to the first question. I think that it is that confidence issue within the industry that is a problem just now. Thank you, Scott. I do not know. Did Steve indicate that he—have you got anything to add to that response, Steve? Yes, I get called everything. I suppose that the key in all of this is best practice. If we think about track 1 in the Scottish Government terminology, it is trying to encourage farmers to baseline and understand what their soils are capable of. One of the things that I think that people will be looking at will be nitrogen use efficiency just now, how to get the best out of the inputs that they are trying to use. You are hearing stories that some farmers will not put fertilisers on some parts of their land where they have older grasses that perhaps are not going to convert that into sugars, etc. Also, if your pH is not right, you are simply probably wasting quite a large proportion of your fertiliser. People will be focusing in on that just now. With regard to the slurry question, of course that is going to be tiered over quite a long period of time, up to 2026. The biggest producers are going to take the hit on that first, so they are going to have to meet the requirements first. Those investments at that level, you would hope that quite a lot of them are already compliant with it, but it may need some fraught-on-bout assistance on those levels. I really like the idea of food waste and actually reconverting that into fertilisers. I think that there is some work on going on the use of fertiliser food waste, fertilisers and food waste into feed sector as well. We are a society where we waste a phenomenal amount of food—30 per cent of our greenhouse gas emissions come from our food wastage. I am trying to address that not only at farm level, because there are efficiencies at farm level that probably every farm can make marginal gains. One of the problems that we have is that we think of this industry as one thing and we generalise all the time. There is a huge variation in performance. If we can bring those that are perhaps poorer performers or at the lower end of the technical efficiency scale up, you will start improving profitability across the board and reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the same time. I am going to bring in Rachel Hamilton for a brief supplementary on the theme before moving on to the next theme, Rachel. You mentioned rolling out track 1 of the national test programme. The NFUS had made a request to the Scottish Government to put towards greater funding to the sustainable agricultural capital grant scheme. First of all, I wondered what the hold-up was. Do you think that it would be good for the Scottish Government or the committee to recommend to the Scottish Government that it replicates what has happened in the rest of the UK with their support to sustainable farming incentives such as paying farmers to plant nitrogen-fixing legumes or clover, etc. All the things that you know that are in that incentivisation. Thank you. There are a number of points there. One, it would be very helpful for me, certainly, if the committee could encourage the Scottish Government to roll out the national test programme as a matter of urgency and get that launch and get farmers able to apply to and take it up. I think that that is hugely important. In terms of what is happening down south just now, I would give caution in terms of following the programmes that are happening down south, because the word that I am getting back from fellow farmers down in England is that the direction of travel in England. I could jeopardise the productive capacity of agriculture. What we could learn more of is looking across the waters to Europe or to Ireland just now in terms of what they are doing to help the farming sector. What they have broadly done is that they have looked at land that is lying fallow just now to see how that could get put back into production. In France just now, they have just announced, but I do not have the details, but they have announced a fodder subsidy scheme, support scheme for a farming community to help with the fodder crisis that they expect the livestock sector to face. The likes of Poland have recently announced a huge financial support to help with fertiliser production, and individual member states also are giving financial support to fertiliser plants to bring them back on to production and hopefully reduce the fertiliser prices. I think that that could all be done, and I would encourage the Scottish Government to accelerate its plans for capital investment. As you have touched on and the previous question touched on, looking at those investments in farm, that could be done to increase productive capacity and increase efficiency in the farming business. Just to come back on that, the Scottish Government, in the conversations that you have had, would be happy to suspend the EFA's as part of the greening requirements? No, I am very disappointed in the decision that we have had from the Scottish Government, which was to reject our call to suspend the EFA requirement and have a look at fallow land. I think that that would have given a good boost to the sector and would have helped confidence to agree, because it would have looked at us using the land that we have at our own disposal to increase predominantly animal feed. I think that that should be looked at again, and I would encourage looking at what incentives we could put in place to encourage greater protein planting in this country. We are seeing through animal feed diets just now that the mix for animal feeds has had to be adjusted due to shortages, and they may continue to the longer the war in Ukraine. That was not really a supplementary question, but Stephen Thomson has asked to respond to that question. I come back to it from a slightly different perspective from Scott, on the EFA thing. One of my concerns is that I have talked to an awful lot of farmers in two MSAC consulting meetings over the last year, and one thing that they are all crying out for is confidence and a signal of the long-term commitment in terms of policy. They need to understand where policy is going. The discussions within the Scottish Government are all about conditionality and delivering on biodiversity, climate change and food production and people in the economy. There is that trade-off, and less farmers are aware of what the long-term future is, i.e. if those conditions are chimed with land that is available for biodiversity or EFA, however they are defined, then those production decisions might be different. There is also this issue, and I think from speaking with Scottish Government colleagues, that there is always concern that EFA would just simply go into producing either more grain for whisky, which obviously has an expert revenue, or also for the feed sector. The thing that got me has always been that we have not done our protein crop ecological focus area, the peas and beans aspect of it particularly well because of our date, so the harvesting date has always been, has gone against the grain for ecological focus areas, and it is different in England. They can harvest their crops, and we should have relaxed that particularly because if we could have done that, that would have reduced long-term nitrogen use and also provided a protein supplement. I think that the longer term, as Scott mentioned looking across the water, Northern Ireland has a protein supplement that farmers can get a couple of support payments based on putting these types of crops in. I think that that is a long-term or medium-term solution that we might have to start thinking about. The other thing is that all of this requires budget, and we know that in 2024 we do not have a commitment to budget all-term in agriculture, and that needs to be resolved pretty quickly, I think. Thank you. We are now going to move on to the next theme, Alison Allan. Thank you, convener. Although we are talking about the impact of the war in the Ukraine, just look at the resilience of food production in Scotland prior to that shock. I wonder if you could say a little bit about the existing, if you like, food resilience broken down perhaps a bit by sector, if you can, and what the options are going forward now to try and strengthen that food resilience in Scotland. Those are probably questions that many people might want to come in, but probably questions initially for Scott Walker and for Stephen Thomson. Thank you. It is a very big question. I will start off by saying to answer. It is one that I suppose I start by looking at the relationship between farm production, the supply chain and retailers, or I will describe it as the lack of relationship that exists there in terms of long-term planning. I would say that, in general, before the war in Ukraine, the resilience within the sector was pretty low and pretty fragile. We in Scotland have very good levels of food quality here. While Stephen touched on it before, we have a wide range of efficiency within the farming sector. We have a lot of farms that are very efficient and other farms that would like to be more efficient if the right systems were put in place. We have a very fragile processing sector in Scotland, where we rely on the farm output going to a very small handful of processors in Scotland. When I look at some of the greatest farm ability for farming, it would tend to be at that processing sector level. If we were to lose certain processors, the option for where farm produce goes becomes very limited, very difficult and tends to be more costly. In terms of then shipping to the rest of the UK. We are sitting at a stage where we need to step back, have a look at where the key drivers are in each of the different supply chains and how we can support them. I will give just one example here, saying that the egg sector, for instance, is that we do not have a processing plant here in Scotland to deal with spent hens. Now, as the rules of transportation of animals become tighter and tighter and shorter and shorter, that will cause a severe problem for us here in Scotland. Strategically, we need to look at how we can help support and put in place a spent hen plant here in Scotland, because if we do not have that, we will not have a neg producing sector here in Scotland. I use that as one example. As another example, I will use the livestock sector or the beef trade, where we will look at what is happening to beef prices and how we can get a domestic beef price that supports that long-term investment. My very last point goes to the point that Stephen Owes is making beforehand, is that people want to see the future direction that they are heading in. What is the future direction of support, both from the Government and the supply chain? That is what is necessary to give the industry the confidence to continue to produce and to invest in the future. If we do not get the right direction there, what we are going to see is a reduction in the productive capacity of the industry here in Scotland. I remind everyone that we are probably going about 40 minutes left in this session, and there are still a lot of questions to be asked. Stephen Owes, can I bring you in and then Elspeth? I will try to be brief in this. I fully agree with Scott, and we probably need to really think about strategic processing in this country and having strategic processing plans available. If you think about the sheep meat sector, the vast majority of our, well, we do not kill, we do not call cast uses in Scotland so much, and they practically all go south to the border for slaughter, and about 55% to 60% of our lambs go south to the border for slaughter. In terms of that resilience, we do not have it in Scotland, which means that we are at the behest of other processors in terms of export opportunities, particularly into the Middle East countries and affluence there. That may mean changes in our processing types and bringing in Halal slaughter. We are looking at all of these in terms of opportunity. In terms of an individual farm level, I would say that we have an incredibly resilient industry, but that is largely driven by the fact that we have agricultural support payments to underpin incomes, but that farms are consistently becoming reliant on their off-farm income to underpin some of the activities in terms of food production and selling off plots of land that enable their non-profitable agricultural enterprises to keep going. I have always said that farmers subsidise food production in some terms because they are running loss-making enterprises and the market does not reflect the true price of food production. The dairy sector tends to work on a cost plus a small margin basis, hence the price increases in that sector very quickly. Global milk supplies are contracting, and all those things are happening just now. I think that we have resilience in the sector in some instances. I will try to be brief, as I know that we are under time pressure. I think that there are many parallels in fishing with some of the things that my colleagues in the panel have been talking about here with regard to resilience. I think that, certainly in fishing, we see that resilience in some parts of our Scottish fleet has really been affected by the Covid pandemic, so the impacts of what we are seeing currently happening are exacerbating that. I would also echo what Scott Scott said about that point about confidence for businesses to invest and to rebuild that resilience and to have resilience in our fishing industry for the future. There are perhaps two things that I would highlight that are really important in terms of the policy landscape in Scotland that would help us to rebuild some of that resilience and to help to increase confidence that the industry could have for a bright future. One of those is about greater investment in fishery science. Everything that we do in fisheries is very much driven by scientific catch advice that we feel, increasingly, does not reflect the way that our distribution of key commercial fish stocks is changing. We would certainly want to see the Scottish Government making appropriate and necessary investment in fishery science to help to support sustainable management of our stocks. I think that the other point that I would make is one that I possibly mentioned before at this committee about how we use our space that sees better marine spatial planning. The fishing industry in Scotland is concerned about the long-term spatial constraints that we face through things like the expansion of offshore wind through the development of a very extensive network of highly protected marine areas. Obviously, there has to be a balance between conservation energy and food production, but at the moment the spatial constraints that our industry faces are very extreme. I think that for the industry to help to rebuild that resilience, to help to see a bright future and to help fishing businesses to have the confidence to invest in the industry for the future and to encourage new people into it, we need to have that confidence that we will have better marine spatial planning that will allow our industry to continue to operate profitably and to continue to make sure that we have our domestic food production. Yes, we must have energy security, but we must also have food security, and our fishing industry is an important part of that. I think that those are some of the things that I would like to see in the policy landscape that would really help our industry to rebuild that resilience, thank you. Mike has indicated that he would like to come in on this question. Okay, thank you very much, convener. I think that it's important here to try and distinguish how we're defining resilience, because the question was about the resilience of production systems, and what concerns me is that we need to have a long-term strategic view on what constitutes a resilient food system. At the moment, we operate at just-in-time system, whereas what we really need is a just-in-case system to account for the sorts of eventualities that we're facing. For example, off the back of Covid, the war in Ukraine, and looking forward to the long term is the impact of climate change. I'm just concerned that the sort of responses that we've had at the moment are about maintaining the status quo of the food system, whereas what we really need to be thinking about is a transformation of the food system to give it the flexibility so that it can cope with future shocks, because we know that those are going to occur from biodiversity loss, from climate change impacts. I think that we need to be careful not to get caught in the trap of what needs to happen now in response to the current situation and not to lose sight of what needs to happen in terms of food system transformations for the wider-scale shocks that are likely to occur. Just as a point, the first thing that I did when the food security issue first arose was to check out what was happening with the El Nino-Laninio cycles. Fortunately, at the moment, we're in a relatively stable situation, but if next year for the next growing season there is a severe El Nino development, it will have severe impacts in terms of global food production. Myself and colleagues over the years have always warned of the increasing probability of multiple and coinciding shocks from war or from climate change impacts. I think that we need to have a really careful view on what's likely to happen next year in terms of some of the world's climate teleconnections. Thank you. Thank you. A number of people have mentioned the importance of the supply chain and preparing it for the future. I wonder if Professor Mathews could offer any observations either about or from Ireland about what differs, or if anything differs in the way in which he sees Scotland and Ireland preparing for the future in that respect. I'm thinking specifically in terms of the supply chain and making it more resilient. I guess one of the points of similarity with the two agricultural economies is that we are both highly export oriented. Although a lot of people will interpret resilience in terms of doing more ourselves and emphasising local food production, certainly for an agricultural economy like Ireland, that really doesn't make a lot of sense. We are always going to be highly dependent on exporting our food off the island. I suppose that tends to focus attention on trying to create a stable and international framework as possible. That's obviously under huge stress and strain with the invasion in Ukraine. What we see at the moment is a domino effect, where because of the initial shock and the increase in global prices, countries are now introducing, if you like, bigger-my-neighbour type of policies where they are trying to protect their own domestic consumers by putting export bans and export restrictions in place. Of course, that's just amplifying the upward trend. Trying to avoid those kinds of bigger-my-neighbour responses for an exporting country like Ireland is hugely important. We are still very much subject to the common agricultural policy. The direction of travel there, as I think also in Scotland, is to try to focus on better integrating those environmental biodiversity and climate impacts of production into farmer decision-making. Probably, in answer to your question, I would encourage the committee to think of ways in which, despite the obvious costs of higher-production input costs in particular, it provides incentives and an opportunity to accelerate some of the changes that are part of government policy. Stephen has mentioned trying to improve nitrogen use efficiency on farms, which is a win-win for farmers. It reduces costs and also reduces greenhouse gas emissions and reliance on imported fertilisers. My sense is to try to think of ways in which we can turn this situation into one where we can, in fact, accelerate some of the necessary changes that Mike has already referred to. It is interesting. I am glad that you touched on this whole crisis by accelerating the direction of travel that we recognise that we will have to take anyway. It is a bit like Covid forcing more people to engage with a medical profession and a more triage system. You had to to remotely speak to your GP and accelerated that direction of travel anyway, so it is interested that you have touched on that. It is a bit like an ill wind. It may actually drive improvements that were needed to be done over a shorter space of time. My question is to your experience on a more European scale. In France, we are taking it seriously, but in France it has been taken incredibly seriously. There is almost panic about the food shortages that we might see in France. Are we taking this crisis seriously enough in Scotland and the UK? I think that the real food security crisis is going to be in Ukraine itself, of course, with the displaced millions of people there, but also in the low-income countries, particularly around the Mediterranean Basin, North Africa and elsewhere in Africa. For us in Europe and in Scotland, I would be very reluctant to use the term food security crisis. There will be an increasing food affordability crisis for some low-income households because, as some other participants have mentioned, we are seeing an increasing food price inflation. There are many households that are running into difficulties, but the solution to that is to provide additional direct income support to those households. It is not really an agricultural market problem, it is a social policy issue. Scotland made this clear at the outset. It is not a food crisis, it is an animal feed crisis within Europe. It is high animal feed cost, putting pressure particularly on the intensive livestock sectors, but we need to put that into perspective. It is certainly not threatening a generalised food security crisis in my view at this point in time. Obviously, as we move from this particular growing season into the next, there are warning lights around fertiliser availability. You have seen already the news today that Russia is threatening to turn off natural gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria. That could extend to other European countries. Although we produce around 90 per cent of our fertilisers domestically within Europe, a lot of that is dependent on imported natural gas from Russia. There are threats that we need to keep in mind, but I would still be clow to use the term generalised food security crisis arising from the Ukraine war. I will touch on something that Scott Scott said, rolling back on the EFAs. I would caution rolling back on EFAs from a reputational damage point of view, because it will not go down well across the other sectors of the country. There is also the point that farmers already plant huge volumes of legumes, as it is. The problem is that we then batter four or five hundred weight of nitrogen over the top and kill the clover out of the grass. There is a shift in behaviour that would also help us here. However, I will touch more on the vulnerability of the wider supply chain. You talked about this earlier on the lack of conversations with supermarkets and the role of the supermarkets' ombudsman. Surely supermarkets produce 90 per cent of our groceries in this country. They have a role to play in making sure that we maintain resilience in our food supply system in this country. Does it concern you that Lord Frost tweeted the other day that the best thing to do is to reduce tariffs on imported goods, not just the ones that we cannot grow but all the products that we can grow, including beef and lamb in this country, and just bring it in from somewhere abroad? Two things there. First of all, I replied to Lord Frost's tweet yesterday. I won't say here what I said, but it's a hugely concerning. It's a huge degree of naivety in showing that the way to solve the problem is to ramp up standards in this country, yet open the doors and allow anything to come into this country regardless of the standards. That one seems fundamentally wrong. Secondly, there is a huge question mark that if you base the whole food security of the UK on the basis that we can source from anywhere abroad at any time, regardless of what else happens. You are putting a lot of trust in a system that we have saw just over what in Ukraine has come. Basically, I am not saying crashing down, because it is not crashing down yet, but it is being strained to the limit, so I do not believe that we will be in a position where we can just source whatever we want and outbid everyone in the future for it. Some of the other commentators have commented on the fact that we have one crisis just now, but we could easily see a drought in America or a flood in America. A few years ago, we saw countries put in place export bans on food, which in essence gave rise to the uprisings that we saw in the Middle East and in Egypt. It is a very volatile situation. I am going back to retailers. In my view, I still go back to what Governments can do a lot and Governments can do a lot more. I think that just sitting and waiting to hope that everything pans out okay is not the right strategy. Ultimately, the retailers have huge power here and could make such a big difference. I am not seeing them do that at this point of time. If we use Brexit as an example, I would give the retailers credit where credit is due. They saw that Brexit was going to cause a huge disruption to them being able to source products. They did everything possible at that point of time to secure their domestic food supply, to buy up what they could buy up and ensure that they would be bringing product on the shelf. We are seeing a situation now that across every area of production costs are increasing, but there is a huge resistance in terms of the retailers in my view to recognise that and to pay the appropriate price for food and to pay a fair price throughout the supply chain. I think that it is an area that should be looked at far more closely. Contracts should be considered as to what is appropriate and what is not appropriate. Retailers could have a huge amount of strength to secure processing capacity in this country and to give the right encouragement to increase food production. We cannot chuck the baby out of the bath water. We are on this course to try to tackle net zero. We all accept that it is going to be an issue. The processing facilities that we have in this country, my belief is that we need to increase that because cattle and sheep travelling south on the hoof take up a lot more room and a lot more lorries than if they are travelling down on the hook. Surely we have to be able to do the processing in this country and then export the product. I think that it was Stephen who said that we should be doing a just-in-case rather than a just-in-time. Would you see that there is value in us trying to invest in those areas? Yes, I would. Again, just for clarity for the committee, so the committee understands where I am coming from, I do not see at all in anything that I am suggesting that we abandon our net zero targets. I think that reducing the carbon footprint of farming is important and it is something that we are committed to, and it ties in with everything that we need to do at this point in time. However, that just relying on just-in-time is not working. We have got to build that resilience within the supply chain, we have got to drive efficiency on the farm, we have got to look at improvements on the farm. We need more processing here in Scotland that allows us to do that and ultimately allows us then to also export abroad. I just want one other bit to add and go back to the point that was talked about by resilience earlier on. I think that we have got to look at some of the infrastructure that we have in Scotland. The port systems, for instance, we saw during Brexit and recently one of the big issues was just having enough containers here in Scotland and enough freezer containers and electricity points at the port system so that we could store the product to get on the ships, to go to Rotterdam and put on bigger ships to go elsewhere. Those are the sort of pressure points that we have got to look at in building resilience and profitability ultimately within the food system here in Scotland. Can I bring in Stephen Thomson? Yeah, just building on what Scott was saying there really is that I always remember the Icelandic volcano crisis where flights were stopped and suddenly we were at like half a day short of running out of food from the shelves, fresh food and we changed the rules very quickly to allow food to fly in. We haven't learned, we haven't learned from that, that's what 12 years, 13 years ago I think, if I remember rightly. Then you look at the Suez, the ship stuck in the Suez and the problems that led to it. We don't seem to learn from issues that are happening. It might, for instance, be right that we need to look at the resilience of our food systems in terms of geopolitics but also in terms of climate. I don't know if anybody is really considering long-term food security with climate change and extreme weather events. You just have to look at the flooding in Australia just now to see that actually La Nina is actually having an impact on some aspects of their production systems. Then we forget the sheer buying power that likes a China have in terms of buying protein, in terms of buying crops, in terms of buying and securing natural resources for long-term food production for their economy. I don't think that we're really really focusing on that. If we go back to pre-Brexit or pre-EU exit, as I keep getting told to call it, pre-EU exit, DEFRA initially announced a zero-tariff system. The long-term impact on our agriculture sector would decimate it, because we cannot compete with some of the lower-cost production systems. If we reduce those tariffs, people can still meet our standards. Australian beef is 60 per cent of its grass or something. It's not hormone-treated. It meets our standards, so it can export to us on a low-cost basis. We know that retailers will source cheap product. Consumers will buy cheap product, even though they say that they want to purchase British. When it comes to the purchase decision, it's an awful lot of household buy on price. Is that where the commissioner then has to have more teeth? I think so, yes. I think that we really need a long-term look at food production global. We need to look at it in a global context. Myself and Alan Rennick and others did a report for Oxford Farming Conference 2013 on power in agriculture. I was shocked when we did that at how certain aspects are so concentrated that it's quite scary at a global scale. We need to revisit those things and look at where the pinch points with regard to things such as phosphates, fertiliser supplies and things that were absolutely required in the long-term running. We need to work at a system in which we are not reliant on a very few number of processors that are reliant on five major supermarkets that control everything. This is a 20-minute warning to both members and panel members. Arrianne Burgess. Maybe that will be quick, because I think that we have started to get responses to this question already anyway. How can we address the simultaneous challenges of high production costs with risk to producing sectors and the rising costs of food with risks to food security of low-income groups? Professor Alan Matthews mentioned additional income support, but can I ask yourself if you have any other thoughts on that and then also bring in Scott and Stephen on that question? If that question was directed to me in terms of the consumer support, I mean clearly the Government said that I'm not fully obey obviously with the recent steps the UK Government has taken, but European Governments have stepped in to help households with higher energy costs, for example, which have risen perhaps higher than food prices over the recent months. My concern would be that some of the interventions seem to, in a sense, hold existing consumption patterns in place when clearly we do need to try to encourage change. We do want households to save on energy. We do want them to move away from using as much petrol in their cars as they do at present. For example, lowering the cost of energy seems to work against that particular goal. If we use that as an analogy for the food system, the approach should perhaps not be to try to make food cheaper by subsidising food per se, but rather by increasing the purchasing power of households to make up for those higher costs, but leaving it to households to make their purchasing decisions in the light of the fact that food is now more expensive because of these higher input costs. Probably outside my area of expertise, but just a few general comments, because the average consumer is going up a very tough time over the remainder of this year. Government help and support aim at those people in society who face unprecedented increases in costs. The world bank said that this is the biggest price shot that we have saw in 50 years. In terms of some practical things that I think could be done, I know that over the course of time we have been working with food banks in different charities on how we could direct farm produce and produce in the processing sector into food banks to help people. I know that sometimes that has to do with packaging and rules, because, for instance, accepting meat is often difficult. That could be looked at in what sort of help and assistance could make to that function. Often it is a bit of an organisational thing to get somebody in place to simply make those connections and make that happen. I know that there is also some education that is useful in terms of how people use different products and how they make the most of what they currently have, how they cook meals instead of all having to be processed products. As I say, it is slightly outside my area of expertise, but there are a few things. The other thing, going back to specifically the farming sector, I think that the medium term is about maintaining our capacity here in Scotland to produce food not just for the Scottish market but for the UK market. If we have that domestic production, that is helpful rather than relying on imports, which, undoubtedly, will rise in price. Having some domestic production here to underpin is hugely important. I would add that the food banks are one way in which we seem to be overcoming some of those issues. If you look to the United States, they have food assistance programmes where you are subsidising the consumer rather than the producer. Those are real alternatives that we have never considered in this country or probably in Europe. We always think that supporting the producer is the easiest way to do those things to maintain food prices or subsidise food production and food prices. There are alternative models out there, but it takes an awful lot of or a long-term vision for Governments and Alipa Faith to do those things, but those could be looked at alongside income support, the mainstream income support measures. In America, I think that it is based on the minimum nutritional standards that a household should be able to afford. I think that what underlies for me is that we need to be looking at better paying jobs and more security in that way, so that people have more money in their pocket from the job that they are actually doing so that they can afford the good food that is being produced in Scotland. Absolutely. That probably should have been considered as part of the good food nation bill that we are working through at the moment. Thank you for that, Steve Natch. That is helpful. I move on to questions from Beatrice Wishart. My questions are probably for Scotland and Elspeth. Mike has already referenced the long-term need to be looking at the transformation of the whole food system. Professor Matthews has mentioned the acceleration of the direction of travel. Looking at medium-to-long-term needs and increasing domestic food production resilience, is there anything else to flag that has not already been mentioned? Any thoughts on the on-going reforms of the agriculture and fisheries policies, for example? For Elspeth, I had the pleasure recently of visiting the new lyric fish market and saw first hand the fantastic variety and high-quality fish that was being landed. Much of the fish caught in UK waters as export, while fish eaten in the UK is imported. When looking at future food security and recognising what you have said about spatial planning at sea, what role does domestic fishing industry play? Can I maybe go to Elspeth to kick off on that one so that it is fresh in our mind, and then we will come back to Scotland? Elspeth? Sure, thank you. I think that there is a very interesting point that you raise about we export a lot of what we catch and import a lot of what we eat. There are lots of fish consumed in Scotland and the UK, but it is often things that we do not catch here. Of course, what we catch here is constrained by what is in our waters. That is largely driven by consumer preferences. Some of the things that we catch, there is not a demand for here. They have not traditionally been eaten, and they have been more traditionally eaten in export markets and vice versa. However, some of the things that we have been talking about as this discussion has gone on in terms of how the food system might have to be transformed in terms of perhaps consumption being closer perhaps to the point of production. I do apologise if there is noise in the background, I am sitting in a hotel and there seems to be some construction going on behind me. Sorry if it is noisy. It comes down to the wider food system transformation in terms of will the food system perhaps either persuade or drive people to more consumption of domestically produced products rather than exporting a lot of what we produce to elsewhere? For some of our exported products, the market is still quite close to home. It is just into the EU, into places such as France and Spain. The carbon footprint of that is still relatively small. Obviously, some other products are going further afield. I think that there is a lot there in terms of not necessarily perhaps things that industry can drive to change that, but actually about how consumers and how the public start to see their role in food transformation and the purchasing decisions that they make. We would certainly hope to see some of the policies coming forward from Government around fisheries to support our industry in terms of its continued production of climate smart foods, low-carbon footprint fisheries. The committee has discussed the joint fisheries statement that the four Administrations are working on. I think that the Scottish Fishermen's Federation has some reservations about how that is going to support the right policies that the industry needs to continue to make the right contribution to our climate smart food production going forward. It is early days with that. There is a lot still to flow from it. There is a lot in the domestic policy landscape that we will be engaging with to try to make sure that we have a domestic landscape that allows our industry to continue to produce this climate smart food. In growing that demand in the UK for domestically caught product, we know that sea fish and other bodies are working hard to try and get more UK produced fish into UK retail, for example. I think that there is a lot that we can do in the industry, but I think too that a lot of what that future looks like will be driven by the consumer role in terms of their purchasing decisions and their role in that food system transformation. That is a good point. Scott, do you have anything to say? Three things I would highlight. One of the things that we would like to see put in place is that the Government has some sort of food security impact assessment on all future legislation, so that there is a clear understanding of what that legislation would mean in terms of the food security impact in costs. I think that that would be helpful and it would focus people's minds. A second bit is going on to future support systems. This is not a debate about production or the environment, which sometimes it is stylised as. I think that you can have both. If you go out on many Scottish farms, you see both working wonderfully and fantastically in partnership. We had a lot of work being done so far in Scotland through first and foremost the farmer-led groups, looking at an agriculture policy that would be appropriate for Scotland that has food production at the centre of it, but also, very importantly, delivers by climate change targets and delivers by biodiversity. That has now been taken on by the area group that is set up. What I would like to see is that coming to fruition as soon as possible, so that there is that direction of travel that is there. I think that it is about putting production at the centre, but also ensuring that we continue to deliver and we accelerate the pace of delivering on climate change targets and enhancing biodiversity. I think that all three can happen exactly the same time, but we need to make those choices and we need to set that direction of travel to give that confidence back to the industry. Thank you, Scott. Sorry, I'll have to stop me there. I'm going to move to a supplementary on this from Alasdor Allan, then Rachel Hamilton. My question was intended to be about unusual species, as it were. Yeah, absolutely. I say unusual. We've just had a discussion about grey lag geese. In terms of food resilience, I don't know if you listened in, we're talking about creating a potential market for grey lag geese given their prevalence on the west coast of Scotland. There's also a question, I suppose, about species like venison. Why is it that the UK appears to be a net importer of venison? I don't pretend that those two species are ever going to make us a food-resilient nation, but there may be other examples, and I just wondered if you had a view on them. Anyone who wants to go first on that. Are you going to go up? Scott, very briefly. In terms of geese, I generally speak to my membership, we see geese as a pest, which are destroying crops and underpinning, doing damage to food production. I'm sure that there will be some sort of market for geese, but I don't see that as being a solution. In terms of venison production, there are a number of farms in Scotland where the market option exists. I think that it could grow in the future. Stephen. Yeah, I did listen in and I was probably smarking a bit when we were talking about geese and dating markets for that. It probably would be a very niche market, and there probably is a market for those kind of things. Generally, if you start looking at the trends in terms of consumption, this is where carcass balancing comes in, is that we export, if you look at our import-export statistics, we export a lot of sheep meat, but its whole carcasses are awful, and then we're importing legs and chops and things like that. Our consumer, and it's a point that I raised in the comment, is that the consumer seems to be very picky, and we've lost this connection with some types of food. Wild venison, we export wild venison into Germany and things like that. We don't seem to have a penchant for these types of products anymore because they're gamey, they taste different, and part of it is that we're breeding poultry that's probably tasteless so that you can put it in a sauce and have a product that way. It's reconnecting people with food is a vital component of that, and that's education, and that takes a long, long process to do so. But yeah, there'll be a niche market for some of these things. Thank you. Rachel Hamilton. Okay, it's a question for Scott, just it's a supplemental to the previous one. You were talking there about the food security impact assessment, which you'd like to see. To ensure that agricultural land is prioritised to address this food insecurity that we're experiencing, does that mean that there should be a moratorium on applications of large-scale forestry that are bought by non-agricultural businesses to offset carbon? In short, yes. I could expand more, but overwhelmingly, yes, there's huge concerns amongst the farming community just about the amount of non-agricultural money that's coming in to buy up big areas of Scotland to offset the carbon emissions elsewhere. I just feel that that is fundamentally wrong. We should be using this land here in Scotland, first and foremost, looking at our own carbon emissions and what we do with that, rather than looking at foreign money coming in and stopping what would be agricultural production. Thank you. That's probably a good note, almost to stop, and I did have a question based almost on that. It was to let Mike Rivington go back in. A brief response. Do we need to accelerate how we look at land use, given that the land use pressure is just heard about additional planting and a bit more extensive farming? We've also heard from elsewhere about the pressures in the sea that's available. Do we need to accelerate what we do with our land use strategy to ensure that food resilience is addressed as well as climate change? Thanks, convener. I think that yes, we do. I think that this is a very serious issue, given the drivers and pressures, but what I would like to point out is how little improved agricultural land is actually used directly for human food. It's about 1.5 per cent and yet about 74 per cent is used for livestock feed for input into cattle or to bottles. I want to flag that we need to define food security more carefully. We have a situation where globally an area of the size of China is used for food production that is wasted. In terms of developing a land use strategy for Scotland, we need to think about what we really mean in terms of food security, rather than the resilience and sustainability of the food system itself and the businesses concerned with it. I know back at what Scott was saying, there are huge opportunities for achieving the multiple targets of food security, reduced emissions and enhanced biodiversity. However, we have to be realistic as well as actually looking at how land use across the whole of Scotland and the whole of the UK is used in terms of providing enough food for the population. Just for the record, can you tell us what percentage of improved agricultural land is not used directly to feed humans? We missed that figure. It was the figure that you quoted at the start. The figure that I have is crops grown directly for human use account for 1.5 per cent of all Scottish agricultural land and that's 4.4 per cent of the improved agricultural land. Thank you very much. I thank all your members. As always, these sessions are fascinating, we always run out of time but thank you very much. That's very useful and we'll play a partner work moving forward. I formally close this meeting and the meeting will move into private.