The Government faces complex challenges in developing a national food policy, writes William Peakin
If you want to buttonhole senior members of the food industry, the Royal Highland Show is as convivial an occasion as any. Amid the livestock and horses, the farm machinery and the produce – Scotland’s finest cheeses, beef, lamb, preserves and malt whiskies – Richard Lochhead, the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs and the Environment, took the opportunity to corral some of the most powerful men in British retailing.
At the show this summer, Stuart Rose, chief executive of Marks & Spencer, Sir Ken Morrison, executive chairman of Morrisons, and Justin King, chief executive of Sainsbury’s, were invited by the minister to a meeting later in the year to discuss their role in Scotland and the Scottish Government’s food agenda.
Lochhead, who was still adjusting to his party being in power and himself being in the Cabinet, said: “This initiative has the potential to herald a new relationship between the Government in Scotland and the leading supermarkets. This is part of our policy to promote our Scottish food sectors and to seek the co-operation of our major retailers to bring economic, environmental and health benefits to the people of Scotland.”
It was a strand in his thinking that would culminate earlier this month with a declaration in an interview with Holyrood that the Government was working on a national food policy. The Government’s food unit has been expanded and is working with producers, processors, retailers and consumers to develop ideas. Lochhead is preparing a paper to be presented to the Cabinet. “Then we’re going to take those discussions to Parliament and have a debate on a food policy for Scotland,” he said.
Lochhead faces a number of challenges in achieving progress. Not least are the supermarkets themselves and the no more- than-bit-part that a Scottish Government may play in how these giants of consumerism impact on the economy and health of the nation. Later this month, it is expected that the Competition Commission will publish the preliminary findings of its latest inquiry into alleged anti-competitive behaviour by supermarkets.
Dealing with the big chains is not for the faint hearted; the Commission, concerned that supermarkets had instilled a “culture of fear” among farmers and small suppliers, ordered two of the country’s biggest supermarkets, Tesco and Asda, to hand over millions of emails exchanged between them and their suppliers over the summer. During June and July both stores cut the prices of thousands of products and investigators are looking for evidence suggesting they have abused their power as large buyers.
The commission had begun by looking at whether the power of Britain’s four biggest supermarkets was good for consumers; that as long as they were competing effectively with each other, a symptom of which would still be a squeeze on suppliers to lower prices, then that was in consumers’ interests. However, the seizure of emails suggests that the Commission believes that the companies have become so powerful that they are threatening the profitability of farms and food manufacturers, discouraging investment and innovation by some and putting others out of business. Not only is consumer choice undermined, but the diversity and viability of the food industry is diminished.
While the minister faces the power of capital he will also have to confront the monolith of public sector procurement. The market for supplying local authorities, hospitals and schools in Scotland is worth £85 million a year (the largest proportion of which, £57 million, is spent by local authorities on education and social work catering).
Lochhead has written to public sector bodies urging them to buy more locally produced food, but he recognises that most buyers and suppliers are working within existing contracts and within the framework of EU procurement rules. There is some good news on procurement - a pilot project in East Ayrshire has shown that serving locally produced food in primary schools has increased school meal take-up – but progress is patchy; for example, none of the NHS boards in Scotland has fully implemented the nutritional standards for hospital patient food that were set in 2003. And only now is the Government embarking on research to estimate the cost of implementing the standards.
If politicians believe that the answers are to be found in the local dimension, they risk being overtaken by global imperatives; earlier this month an eminent group of scientists called for the amount of meat consumed globally to be reduced by 10 per cent in order to combat climate change and improve health. “Against the argument that [it] would not work because of strong consumer preferences for meat we argue that the unprecedented challenge posed by climate change necessitates radical responses,” said Professor Tony McMichael, of the Australian National University.
“Many collateral health gains should accrue from these proposed changes, undertaken to stabilise world climate and secure our future, including a healthier diet, improved air quality, more reliable freshwater supplies, and reduced tensions in a more environmentally attuned world. On a worldwide level, the achievement of rational energy use, food production, and associated environmental sustainability would underpin wellbeing, health, and longevity for human populations and the world’s environment.”
Experts in Scotland have a sense of déjà vu at the news of Lochhead’s initiative: “We have a national food policy, it’s been in place for 11 years, agreed by several different governments now,” said Professor Mike Lean, Chair of Human Nutrition at Glasgow University, one of the authors of the Scottish Diet Action Plan. “It’s one of the best organised in Europe, it’s the only comprehensive [one] in the world. It’s a good policy which has stood the test of time but the only thing that has not happened is that the implementation of that policy was not taken seriously when we wrote it.
“We said you would need Cabinet input, cross-cutting funding and cross-departmental working. We also said you would need some way of regulating trade and industry which food comes under and is therefore a reserved matter. We can’t deal with nutrition and obesity in Scotland unless we take charge of food policy.”
The SDAP was launched by the Scottish Office in 1996, an initiative that was endorsed by the new devolved government three years later. In any attempt to develop policy, an important source of guidance for the current Government would have to be both the SDAP and a review of the plan published last year. The review contains cautionary evidence surrounding the challenges in changing the culture of food production and consumption and particularly, the power of the multi-national food industry and the supermarkets.
“Overall, the action taken has not had a significant impact on population trends in food consumption and nutrient intakes in Scotland over the last ten years,” according to the review, led by Tim Lang, Professor of food Policy at City University, London. “A separate report from the Food Standards Agency Scotland (FSAS), as well as the panel’s own analysis, shows that the dietary targets set for 2005 are overwhelmingly not being achieved.” The aim of the plan’s dietary targets was to reduce diet-related mortality and morbidity in Scotland, particularly that related to illnesses such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes and to being overweight. The review said that targets were, and remained, “valid and laudable in their public health intent and sit comfortably with Scotland’s other social, economic and political goals.”
It recognised that substantial progress in some areas, for example, the appointment of a food and health co-ordinator with the Scottish Executive, the creation of alliances on food and health “to increase policy leverage”, the formation of the Scottish Community Diet Project within the Scottish Consumer Council, to support community food initiatives, the breeding and selling of leaner livestock, healthy eating campaigns, action in schools and specific dietary information for expectant mothers and encouragement to breastfeed.
“Rates of initiating and maintaining breastfeeding have risen sharply in all social classes,” the review team reported. “Breastfeeding rates in Scotland are now above those in England and Wales, with 70 per cent of Scottish mothers now reported to initiate breastfeeding, compared with 55 per cent of mothers in 1995. There is also evidence of improved outcomes from the introduction of free fruit in schools and from guidance on the nutritional content of school meals.
“Systematic support for community food initiatives has helped to give a voice to issues regarding food inequalities at the national level
Systematic support for community food initiatives has helped to give a voice to issues regarding food inequalities at the national level 
and, with small-scale financial investment, has helped to raise skills, access and consumption for some in low income areas. However, overall, the reach and population impact of these initiatives appears small.”
Aside from a slight reduction in the intake of fat as a percentage of food energy, progress has been disappointing in several key areas: the average daily consumption of fruit and vegetables remains around 246g a day, whereas the target was to achieve a minimum of 400g per person per day; average intake of saturated fatty acids has fallen from about 15.6 per cent to 15.2 per cent of food energy, whereas the target was to reduce this to no more than 11 per cent; the target to increase intake of complex carbohydrates has not been met; the same for oil-rich fish, where the aim was to reach 88g per person per week when in fact it has remained at about 34g.
Of greatest concern were those areas in which the trends are moving in the wrong direction: intake of sugars implicated in tooth decay have risen rather than been held constant for adults and reduced for children; potato consumption has fallen by 25 per cent instead of increasing by 25 per cent; and bread consumption has fallen by 12-25 per cent in the case of brown bread - instead of increasing by 45 per cent.
“Overall, the consumption levels of the ‘healthy’ foods that were targeted to increase are significantly lower in the most deprived groups of the population,” said the panel. “Trends in Scotland’s food consumption and nutrient intake in the last ten years have, in part, been shaped by macroeconomic changes in food retailing and catering and related shifts in eating patterns. For example, the rising trend in sugar intakes is linked to changing patterns of eating and drinking outside the home in Scotland, where there has been a worrying rise in the consumption of soft drinks, snacks and confectionery in recent years. Soft drinks, confectionery and lager and beer are the three greatest contributors to sugar intakes.”
The panel concluded that the failure to meet dietary targets was because the plan had underestimated the impact of inequality in Scotland; resources and initiatives “have been spread too thinly across a broad range of areas instead of focusing on achieving population-level impact within a few priority areas”; and because the broad range of actions recommended was not clearly and consistently linked to the narrow range of food and nutrient targets identified.
“The SDAP has adopted a wholly consensual partnership approach to working with the food industry,” said the panel, “and thus underplayed the powerful role of the food supply chain in shaping food content, access, availability and consumer demand over the last ten years, such as the period of rapid restructuring of the food industry or the undermining of health messages by powerful marketing and advertising of foods and drinks. The SDAP has not deployed the full set of policy tools available, most notably those of exercising regulatory and legislative powers of government to control the food supply chain and help create demand.”
The panel concluded that, although some advances in thinking and practice have been made and some initiatives had been “inspiring as well as effective”, the shift required and sought by the SDAP had not yet been realised. “There are some important lessons for future policy. To achieve population-level impact, a more focused and prioritised approach to policy and implementation may prove to be more effective than a broad range, or ‘scattergun’, of initiatives,” the review concluded.
“Given the complexity of modern food systems and their dynamics, action needs to be co-ordinated across all levels of food governance, from local to international level. The actions need to be more plausibly linked to policy outcomes and targets and founded upon the overarching strategic themes with which all stakeholders – the state, supply chain and consumers - can engage. Lines of accountability, monitoring and performance reporting on policy implementation need to be improved. Greater use of regulatory powers and incentives can be appropriate and can be used to set goals for the food supply chain as well as help build consumer demand.”
It proposed that the Government should adopt four themes: closer integration between the policy to improve Scotland’s diet-related health and those of social justice, sustainable development and agriculture; the setting of food-related targets that take into account social and economic inequality; engagement with the food industry in Scotland so that public health and sustainability are the over-riding drivers for food production and supply – “so pervasive is poor diet, that reliance on individual choice as the prime ideology in shaping food supply is no longer an adequate policy or ideology. If Scotland’s diet and food culture is to change, the quality and nutritional value of the food grown, processed, retailed and catered in Scotland will have to alter.”; and the need to develop new governance structures, institutions and leadership – “Where necessary, there will have to be a political appetite for legislative support. This has worked for breastfeeding and tobacco control, sending strong signals that health has to be the priority.”
But the panel was optimistic about the possibilities: “The task may appear daunting, but Scotland has much in its favour, not least, its political room for manoeuvre. In an interconnected world, Scotland has the opportunity to work with other small nations in Europe on food and nutrition policy, building on the lessons learned over the past ten years and acknowledging its failures, while retaining a commitment to tackle the real problems that exist.”
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