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Moderated e-mail conference on small farms and food security

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Mon, 17 Oct 2016 15:53:50 +0000
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My name is Lee-Ann Sutherland. I am a social researcher at the James Hutton Institute in Scotland. As part of the SALSA consortium, we will be looking at small farms and food security in Scotland, UK.

 

Regarding Question 3.2.2 on the boundaries of food systems:



Small farms in Scotland are often ‘crofts’, small holdings of poor quality land, which historically were tenanted to employees of large estates, so employees could provide their own subsistence and cheap labour to the estate at the same time. They are now legally protected, and tend to produce primarily beef and sheep through extensive grazing (the holdings are small, but they usually have access to tens of hectares of common grazing). Until a couple of decades ago, crofts produced vegetables and marginal grain crops but this is no longer financially viable, although there have been some recent attempts to introduce greenhouses for fruit and vegetable production.

 

Crofts raise a number of issues in relation to food security – they produce very little of their own food, but have easy access to food through shops etc. Superficially, they do not appear to be food insecure – like most people in Scotland, much of what they eat comes from supermarkets. There is very little local processing – for many crofts, the abattoirs are several hundred miles away. Although there is a demand for locally produced food, beef and sheep grown locally have to be shipped outside of the locales for processing, and then shipped back in, making them very expensive and not truly ‘local’. Crofters typically work part-time in other jobs, and are subsidised by the government to encourage people to continue to populate remote areas. It seems fairly obvious that crofts would be more food secure if they had local processing facilities, but in an environment where they still have ready access to food, this is not enough of an issue to raise the government support needed.  

 

My question is how to define the boundaries of a regional food system for people who are highly dependent on processors and food sources distant from their locales. Where should we draw the boundaries? A geographical area where most of the smallholders produce the same thing? A radius around villages or an urban centre? A radius around supermarkets? A radius around abattoirs?

 

Lee-Ann Sutherland

Senior Social Scientist

James Hutton Institute

Aberdeen, 

UK.

E-mail: Lee-Ann.Sutherland (at) hutton.ac.uk



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