Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. Thank you, John, for initiating this debate, and also to everybody who's contributed, and it's a delight to follow Jenny as well with a focus on food. And actually, it's on a specific area that I want to focus my short comments. I want to focus on the issues of hunger and food poverty, and the campaign that has been running nationally for some months now, which is the Co-operative Party campaign nationally for food justice.

It starts from the basic premise that healthy, nutritious, affordable food should be a basic right for everyone. It doesn't matter what your circumstances are, where you live, where you come from, healthy, nutritious, affordable food should be a right. Yet we've got too many people right across the UK and here in Wales who are going hungry, and it is after a decade of Tory austerity; we cannot ignore that. We have an inexorable rise in food banks; it's one symptom of a larger problem. It's been made worse by cruel, pernicious tax and welfare changes that have hit the lowest paid and the most vulnerable in our society, and in our communities where we live.

The causes of hunger are rooted in austerity, and UK Tory policies of universal credit, the benefits cap and freeze and the bedroom tax have all played their part, but we also have, as has been mentioned in this debate, a dysfunctional economy that no longer, too often, pays a fair day's pay for a fair day's work for too many people. And we have a broken housing market that adds to poverty and debt. We simply have too many people going hungry on a daily basis in the UK, in the sixth richest country on the planet. 

And yet, at the same time, we have a relentless growth in obesity and type 2 diabetes and other conditions, which can devastate the quality of life of an individual, which will shorten lives. They also impact, of course, on our NHS. And some communities now are effectively food deserts, where people simply cannot access nutritious, healthy, affordable food. This is a UK-wide problem of hunger, of poor nutrition, and it's driven by continuing austerity and pernicious tax and welfare changes. 

But we can't ignore the recent findings of the South Wales Food Poverty Alliance report, which states that in 2017-18, 98,350 three-day emergency food supplies were provided to people in Wales in crisis—in crisis—by food banks by the Trussell Trust. Of these, over 35,000 went to children in this country. According to the Food Standards Agency, a fifth of people on Wales are worried about running out of food, and a quarter of 16 to 34-year-olds surveyed in Wales actually ran out of food in the past year. 

The Food Foundation, as John mentioned, has shown that 160,000 children in Wales are living in households for whom a healthy diet is increasingly unaffordable. Reception-age children in Wales are significantly more likely than the Welsh average to be obese if they live in areas of higher deprivation. And the gap between obesity prevalence in the most and the least deprived quintiles of our society has increased from 4.7 per cent in 2015-16 to 6.2 per cent in 2016-17. Everything is going in the wrong direction.

So, we can and we must use every mechanism at our disposal to tackle this in Wales, even if at a UK level, out of our control, the Government seems hell-bent on making things worse. And we have the right policy and legislative framework to do this with the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, and we have a cross-Government commitment to tackling poverty in all it forms. But as we've heard so often today, it's the strategy, the direction, the milestones and the clear leadership on this that we require.

But we need to do more to tackle food justice. Practical actions. So, our campaign is calling for councils throughout Wales to designate a lead Member for food poverty; to draw up a food action plan, working with local partners on the ground; to take inspiration from the emerging community responses to food poverty; to work with the existing local food partnerships, or if not, in the absence of it, to set one up; and to get a measure of the scale of the problem in your area, because we know that what you measure gets acted upon. And at an all-Wales level, Minister, underpinned by our flagship well-being of future generations Act, we're calling for the recognition of the right to healthy and nutritious food and a commitment to delivering food justice in the new national milestones in Wales, so that we can track progress.

It's been a delight for me, Dirprwy Lywydd, to see so many Members of this Assembly and councillors across the land and ordinary people signing up to this food justice campaign. There have been many Ministers who've signed up to it as well. So, in the temperate and, I think, considered mood of this debate today, let's turn this campaigning energy into real action at a local and national level. Let's make that access to nutritious, healthy food a right and take the practical steps to make sure that there is not hunger in the sixth wealthiest country in the world.