The COVID crisis has shown us all, I think, how important local food supply can be, and how the current industrial food system is failing. It's failing producers, it's failing processors and it's failing those of us who eat and drink the food.

There have been many stories, Llywydd, around the time of COVID, that have been heartbreaking for all of us, but one that really upset me was taking a phone call from a farmer in Hendy in Carmarthenshire at the beginning of the COVID crisis, who was having to pour his milk down the drain, because his customers were a business that mainly sold to the hospitality business—coffee shops and so on—outside Wales, and they simply told him that they didn't need his milk. And the nature of their contract was that it was actually quite difficult for him to sell it to anybody else. And worse for him and his family, a couple of miles up the road in Llanelli, were families who were losing work, with more and more families depending on foodbanks, and yet, he couldn't even give that milk away, because there was no capacity to sell it on.

Well, the Beynon-Thomas family took a long look at that and they decided that they couldn't tolerate that, and in a very short space of time, they converted one of their outbuildings into a small-scale pasteurising centre and they're selling milk through a milk vending machine, which, I have to say, was something that I'd never heard of before. And there are so many advantages to that. People locally can buy a really fresh, local product, and all the profit goes back into the farm and is then spent locally. Ifan Beynon-Thomas, the young farmer who set this initiative going, his father said to me that he thought he was crazy when he started to talk about a milk vending machine, but now, his father, of course, can see the profit going straight into the farm. They've done so well that they've almost paid off their debt in a matter of months and they are on the point of creating a new job because the demand has been so great that Ifan can't keep up with that and all his other farming responsibilities. And this, to me, is a great example of what we could do, on a small scale, but the demand has been huge and now he's selling into local businesses as well, and can expand his pasteurising capacity. And, he can give milk away; it doesn't have to go to waste. That's just one very small local example of what we can do and what we need to invest in.

The other issue that was highlighted through the COVID crisis in the region that I represent is the importance of public procurement and local public procurement. We all remember—I've mentioned it in the Chamber before—the food boxes for our shielding fellow citizens that were being bought from a big, UK-wide company. Some of the food was unsuitable and some of it was turning up actually off. When the second round—and I'm not blaming the Government in the crisis for going for one big supplier—but when the second round of those food boxes was able to go out, Carmarthenshire County Council was able to use Castell Howell, a local food supplier in Cross Hands; the quality of the produce was much better and it was much more appropriate for people in those communities and, of course, all that money is then recycled into local jobs and into the local community. We have to—and others have touched on this—stop the bleeding out of the public sector spend on food. Forty-five per cent of what our public sector spends on food in Wales—and as others have said, that's over £70 million a year—goes outside Wales. We have to be able to decrease that.

Llywydd, the industrial food system doesn't work as it stands. It leaves people in food poverty. I'm full of praise for what the volunteers in local foodbanks do, but I am full of shame that, in one of the richest countries in the world, people have to depend on foodbanks, and Llyr Gruffydd has touched on food poverty. Our food producers are often fragile as businesses; they often can't sell at the rate—they can't even make a profit. And we face profiteering by some of the really big companies, and when I look at what some of the supermarkets and some of the other big wholesalers pay to our farmers, I don't apologise for use of the word 'profiteering'. 

We need, as Llyr said, to align all the food initiatives. Each of them is positive in itself, but it needs to be consistent. We need that cross-sector commission to develop a road map to a comprehensive food policy that delivers for us all.