Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer.

The food and drink action plan delivers our food strategy in Wales. Published well in advance of the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, it is delivering on all seven of the well-being goals. The plan’s 48 actions encompass five priorities, including a leadership board of industry and sector leads; strong provenance for Wales’s food and drink; more training, upskilling and innovation; sustainable growth for businesses and trade; and a focus on food safety and security. The Food and Drink Wales industry board, under the chairmanship of Andy Richardson, is taking forward work streams including business and investment, customers and markets, and people and skills. This work will inform me of the further actions needed for continued growth.

Food sector growth contributes to the goal of a prosperous Wales. This is a highly significant industry in the Welsh economy. The farm-to-fork food chain has a turnover in excess of £15.5 billion and employs over 220,000 people and is Wales’s biggest employer. The action plan sets an ambitious target to grow the turnover of the food and farming sector by 30 per cent to £7 billion annually and to achieve this by 2020. Two years on and growth has exceeded expectations at 17 per cent to £6.1 billion and is already more than half way towards the 2020 target.

So, what does this growth look like? In 2014-15, our growth programme contributed directly to over £10 million in sales growth and the creation of 550 jobs. Business support includes the Wales-Ireland, European-funded clusters programme, supported by Ifor Ffowcs-Williams, the EU head of analysis and clusters. This programme has already engaged nearly half of the food manufacturers in Wales. Current clusters include premium products, high-growth businesses, innovation in healthier nutritional products, and a seafood-specific cluster.

I am also pleased to announce that we will be launching an export cluster later this year. Further development of export markets will continue to be essential in striving towards the plan’s vision. The industry generates over £260 million from exports, with almost 90 per cent to the European Union. This is an increase of over 102 per cent since 2005.

In the past year, our export and trade events programmes helped Welsh businesses deliver over £7 million of new sales, and over £15 million of prospects are being developed. The support we offer food manufacturers includes bespoke advice, showcasing, assistance to attend trade events, dedicated export missions to target markets, and facilitated business meetings. Businesses in other parts of the UK are now looking at Wales as an exemplar of best practice.

Foreign direct investment is an important contributor to growth. We are targeted in our approach, as FDI requires relationship building over time. A notable success in recent times is Calbee, the Japanese snack food manufacturer established in Deeside in 2015, which created up to 100 jobs. Calbee is exactly the sort of company we are pleased to help. It is innovative; producing healthy, vegetable-based snacks to meet the increasing demand from consumers for snacking.

The food industry has a responsibility towards achieving a healthier Wales. Diet and nutrition are major determinants of lifespan and quality of life. Our food-for-the-future conference emphasised the shared responsibility throughout the food chain to support healthier eating. Manufacturers must look to product reformulation while retailers and food service must provide clear and informative labelling and encourage the healthy choices.

We work with the National Procurement Service through its food category forum to factor healthy eating criteria into the tendering process. Seventy-three public bodies are now committed to using NPS in areas of common and repeatable expenditure. I will continue to sponsor Food Innovation Wales, which provides research and development facilities and expertise for food manufacturers, including the manufacture of healthier products. In the past year, £12 million of additional growth in Welsh businesses resulted from new product and process development.

Food poverty can be due to lack of affordability or limited access to enable healthy choices. We support many initiatives to tackle food poverty—some well established such as community growing and community food co-operatives. The new food poverty alliance is a coming together of public, private and third sector organisations and is taking forward work to address holiday hunger in schoolchildren, which was piloted by Food Cardiff last year. The alliance will also investigate how to improve the uptake of free school meals and will work with retailers to partner them in tackling food poverty initiatives.

We are providing significant support to food businesses to enable them to be globally responsible. The Resource Efficient Wales service helps businesses achieve efficiencies in water and energy use and achieve more effective waste management. We are signatories to Courtauld 2025, which is an ambitious voluntary agreement that brings together organisations and businesses across the food system to cut waste and greenhouse gas emissions associated with food and drink by at least one fifth by 2025. We are encouraging businesses to become signatories. Global responsibility extends to the design of our grant schemes. The food business investment scheme includes sustainability measures in its application screening process. The first round has identified £197 million of investment and potentially 1,333 new job opportunities.

The food industry’s contribution to cohesive communities is readily apparent in our support for food festivals. An independent evaluation in 2015 reported that, collectively, they are estimated to support 417 jobs within the Welsh economy and bring in a net additional £25 million per annum through trading, but also through business generated in the local economies surrounding festivals.

Food security and food safety are priorities in the plan and are paramount towards achieving a resilient Wales. We work closely with the Food Standards Agency to improve food safety. The food hygiene ratings scheme has proved a tremendous success in raising standards in catering establishments and is an exemplar for other nations. The resilience of the Welsh food and drink industry is private sector dominated and well-developed contingency plans are in place. Food is one of the critical sectors represented on our internal resilience steering group. We participate in the global food security programme and in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’s food chain emergency liaison group, which assesses risks to food supply and mitigates threats.

Food events are a great vehicle to promote our vibrant culture and thriving Welsh language. The Food and Drink Wales identity is now well recognised internationally and is widely respected. We launched our website last year to communicate and inform industry, stakeholders and the public about our Wales food nation and have recorded over 5,000 page views and 1,500 Twitter followers. We are actively working with many quality Welsh producers to secure many more protected food name products and Wales is becoming synonymous with a rich food heritage.

Deputy Presiding Officer, I have presented a snapshot today of the achievements of the food and drink action plan. The plan is about so much more than food; it is about delivering on our promises to future generations.