8. Plaid Cymru Debate: The food sector

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:41 pm on 2 December 2020.

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Photo of Huw Irranca-Davies Huw Irranca-Davies Labour 5:41, 2 December 2020

Can I say what a pleasure it is to take part in this debate? I think the contributions preceding mine have been excellent; I hope I can add something to it. But there's something that I've agreed with in everybody's contribution so far. There are some areas of disagreement, and I'll pick up on the point that's just been made. There are some good parts of my Conservative colleague's contribution, but I'd just highlight that issue of the focus on productivity alone is not where we should be. Productivity is important in terms of farmland, but it's not the be-all and end-all. I want to turn this upside down a little bit, and focus on what we're trying to achieve out of food and the food system. I have to say, there have been some really, really strong ideas and strategies and plans over many, many years. Welsh Government has had some of the best, most innovative, coherent, integrated plans—the previous Welsh Government, by the way—but they haven't been totally followed through, and some things are pulled in different directions. So, let me just say that we should turn this upside down a little bit.

Let's start from what we're trying to do with the whole of the food system, and other speakers have said about this as well. What does a holistic vision of food look like? Now, I would say that there are certain things that can underpin this, and there's been plenty of good stuff written and talked about on this, not least here in Wales, I have to say, as well. It should be to do with an absolute right to good food. And do you know, by actually saying that—and by the way, UN committees have criticised the UK for not enshrining this right within UK legislation—maybe we can do something here in Wales. But if you actually put a right to good food for everybody—good, affordable, environmentally-friendly, sustainable food—it actually drives change within the food system. All of a sudden you have those things that people have been talking about, which is local food networks where the reward goes to workers in the fields and to local farmers and to community farms and local distributors, and then you drive local procurement around it.

If you have a right to good food, what you have is children coming out of school who haven't just done one or two lessons on how to make pizzas and so on, but they genuinely understand where the food comes from and how to use it, and then they grow up being able to use the food and the produce that comes from around them, and, importantly, you develop a food culture here in Wales very different from parts of the food culture we currently have. Currently, we're slightly schizophrenic. We have some of the best food in the world here in Wales, some of the best brands, some of the best local produce, and then we have the big, if you like, industrial mechanised approach as well. Now, really, if we had that right to food, what it drives is a pride in that local food, where it comes from, and the fact it appears on your table. If you look at what they do in places like Italy and France, places like Italy—northern Italy, where part of my family are from—it is absolutely guaranteed that the food that is delivered on the school tables and in the hospitals and in the public bodies has to be fresh, local food, unless it can't be provided, then they can go elsewhere. It's written into the legislation and so on.

So, what I would suggest is that part of this—it is picked up in some of the Plaid Cymru main motion, it is picked up in the Government's main motion as well—is looking at what this shared vision is. One thing I would say very strongly is that I like the idea that picks up bringing together farmers, businesses, public bodies, civil society, community farms, community growers, so we stop having unaffordable, non-nutritious food that is shipped across the world, that has all sorts of additives in it, and we actually develop a very different vision of it and then we work outwards from there.

All of this—and my final point is this—if we wanted to do this, and we could in Wales, because we've started doing bits of it already, my worry is that some of the proposals around the UK internal market proposals and some of the lack of clarity on funding that is coming to us after the EU might well hamper our ability to do this, because you need a bit of a bank balance to do this sort of change in terms of the way we use our land, we reward public goods within the land, and you also need the ability to do things differently from other nations within the UK to lead the way. So, I worry a little that we're on the cusp of having the rug pulled from under us in our ability to carve a different pattern, but we can do it here in Wales.

The WWF proposals are very good. I'd also recommend the food manifesto for Wales, which is a citizens' approach to developing food, and it talks about the environment, the role we play on the global stage in Wales, the fact that farmers and growers respond to local demand, the fact that Government recognises the value of social, economic and environmental importance of food, all of those. We've got the ideas, if we can bring them together in a co-produced vision, it will drive those strategies, and if we don't do it now because we don't think we have time, let's do it in the next Government.