A conference in Dundee exploring the issue of food security, attracted a range of senior figures, including producers and leading academics.

The event, ‘Feeding Tayside through the climate crisis’ is the first event organised by Bioregioning Tayside, an organisation working to develop community resilience in the face of significant challenges which are seeing many food and drink producers struggling to stay in business.

A series of five panel discussions aimed to identify the pressures on farmers, food systems, and the environment. Panellists included David Thomson, chief executive of The Food and Drink Federation Scotland; Martin Kennedy, NFUS president; and Wendy Barrie, director of the Scottish Food Guide.

Bioregioning Tayside’s co-founder, Clare Cooper, said: “Tayside is an area with a wealth of natural resources. We have some of the best farmland in Scotland, and remarkably beautiful surroundings.

“Yet we have growers who are struggling to make a living, food outlets facing closure, people without enough to eat, and our natural world is on a precipice. The current system isn’t working.

“We need to develop a framework which puts wellbeing at the centre of what we do. Community supported agriculture means fresh, local food is on the shelves, cuts food miles, keeps the quality we need for good health, and puts resilience back into our food supply.”

Panels addressed key themes of economic competitiveness, performance, accessibility, cultural and social norms, and capability.

The capability panel was chaired by Pietro Lannetta, of the James Hutton Institute, with Martin Kennedy and Pete Ritchie, from Nourish Scotland, as panellists. Mr Ritchie said it is 'problematic' that processing food can take away nutritional value while adding value in monetary terms and 'we need to push back and have less processed food in our lives'.

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“We have concentrated convenience and access in very few places. The multiple retailers in the UK are phenomenally efficient in many ways, but it is problematic they concentrate our access to food. We now have a system that is predominantly dependent on long food chains," he said.

“We are not particularly good at articulating what our food culture is. Our nature in Scotland is depleted, our food culture is depleted and we need to have a regenerative approach to our food culture, as well as our soils.”

Mr Kennedy described farming as 'probably the most resilient industry in Scotland'. He said: “Supporting local is something that is core to what I try and do, and push on a constant basis, but the reality is we’re not paying enough for it.”

He highlighted that there were 67,000 people working directly in agriculture and 360,000 working in the wider food and drink sector in Scotland. He pointed to a high-quality blueberry producer who could not sell his product, while blueberries continued to be imported from other parts of the world.

Mr Kennedy described 'bioregioning' as fantastic 'but we have to value food for all the positives that it brings and that is about the social economic values that we have, that’s what keeps people living and working in rural areas that drives the economy in the rural areas'.

Concerns about accessibility to local produce included residents on low-incomes being restricted by how far they could afford to travel to shop, making it difficult to get to farmers’ markets and other outlets with healthy options.

Alex Brewster, from Rotmell Farm, in Perthshire, outlined the work being undertaken on his farm to move the farm to an ecological system of the landscape. He said: “Food is a convenience and we need to start talking about nutrition and we need to define what nutrition is. Nutrition should be 15% of any education curriculum – how to prepare it, how to eat it. At a local level, we have the chance to influence how people buy food.

“One of the things coming out of society is, I think we are starting to unpick, potentially, is that a lot of human health issues are down to the food we are eating and all the chemistry that is going with it and that hasn’t been publicly acknowledged yet.”

One member of the audience asked how the panel felt about prime agricultural land in Tayside being used to grow crops for alcohol, which is not helping with food production. A number of responses pointed to by-products from the crops being used and the importance of whisky to the economy.

Rural Affairs Secretary Mairi Gougeon described bioregioning as a 'brilliant initiative' and that Tayside was ideally placed to deliver. She said: “I was quite encouraged by a lot of what I was hearing. There was a lot of talk about the Good Food Nation Act and the potential for that.

“We are obviously working on our Good Food Nation Plan that we are hoping to consult on at some point this year and I think it can bring all the different elements that we heard about today in terms of what we are trying to do in terms of climate, for our food retail sector, how we can get more of the quality food that we produce here to our local communities and strengthen local supply chains.”

Speaking after the event, Mr Kennedy said: “Everybody talks about local, but we don’t have the facilities, we don’t have the processing and we don’t have the price. If the returns are there, then people will do it. And because there are no returns, is why we have lost the small processors.

“I don’t think this is doable until we get recognition for and value food properly. Even with the increase in the cost of food, we are still only spending an average of 14% of our income on food. It’s come up from around 9% in the last three years because of inflation.

“In the whole of Europe, we are paying the least for our food relative to our income and the third lowest in the world – it’s not a great statistic. In France, they have ‘local’, but they are spending up to 20% of their disposable income on food because they value it.”

Work on Bioregioning Tayside will continue, with the organisation looking at running a series of events with food producers from across Tayside during the 2023 growing season with another two-day conference in the autumn.