The return of the Westminster Agriculture Bill to the Commons in the next few days is a pivotal moment – for Brexit, for Scotland and in many ways for democracy. The latest Which? Poll out today shows 94% of people want to maintain high food standards and 77%
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Cereal production in Scotland is dominated by a small number of conventionally bred varieties of barley, wheat and oats. These have low genetic diversity and tend to require a large amount of chemical input to achieve high yields. Most of the grain produced from these varieties is
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The UK Government is currently consulting through a White Paper on how the UK internal market should operate after Brexit. Like much of the conversation about Brexit, it’s a political tussle pretending to be about economics. Devolution gives the Scottish Parliament and Government powers to legislate on
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At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic our food supply chains were forced to flex beyond what many thought possible, and whilst they were temporarily disrupted during the pandemic, exacerbated by media-fed anxiety about shortages, food continued to flow. Although this shows a certain robustness and ability
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The boss of Unilever wrote the foreword, and yet some sections of yesterday’s World Economic Forum report on ‘The Future of Nature and Business’ could have been written by Nourish: “COVID-19 is a stark reminder of how ignoring biophysical risks can have catastrophic health and economic impacts
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This week’s House of Lords Select Committee report is in many ways familiar reading. The UK’s food system results in shocking inequalities in access to good food especially in the context of COVID, an epidemic of chronic disease, and widespread environmental damage. What’s to be done? The
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This blog post was originally a talk given by Keesje Avis at a webinar entitled “Scotland’s Response to the Climate Emergency” hosted by FoES and partners. See all the presentations here. When talking and thinking about climate change mitigation, we tend to talk about numbers and in
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Brexit was never going to be good for food. The EU, for all its faults, has been progressive on food safety and labelling, on safeguarding local food traditions, on environmental protection, on GM regulation and on animal welfare. The Common Agricultural Policy has been stubbornly misdirected towards
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A few miles West of Dundee is the Intelligent Growth Solutions’ (IGS) vertical farm, on the James Hutton Institute campus. On the outside, it looks like a square steel structure, ten-meters-high, in a muddy field. Inside, there are four ‘towers’, each of which potentially contain 50 growing
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As the number of people struggling to access food has increased with this crisis, the experience of food insecurity has become much more widespread. Being able to access food safely and with dignity is now on the minds of nearly everyone. This has brought many more people into
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