SAC Rural Policy Centre

This Briefing is based on a pilot survey that aimed to capture the views of SAC Council Members attending the Competitive Agriculture Committee about the status of innovation in four selected agrifood sectors in Scotland, namely Low Carbon Farming, Genetic Selection and Improvement, Animal Health and Welfare and Food and Drink.

Sustainable intensification has been promoted by a number of influential national and international policy groups as the solution to meeting the nutritional needs of a growing global population from a fixed or declining resource base.

In 2011, the Oxford Farming Conference commissioned Rural Policy Centre researchers to carry out a study to provide information for the 2012 Oxford Farming Conference on the theme of 'Agriculture: tomorrow's power'.

This report is an update on SAC's 2008 Retreat from the Hills report which highlighted significant declines in the sheep and cattle sector across much of Scotland.

Approximately 40% of Scotland's Utilised Agricultural Area (2,284,000 ha) was estimated to be under High Nature Value (HNV) farming systems in 2009.

The aim of this Policy Briefing is to propose a practical way forward to integrate farming and agri-environment payments post-2013 and to stimulate discussion across all stakeholders involved in the debate and delivery of CAP changes.

The growing agenda on the environmental and social benefits of maintaining farming production, particularly in areas where farming is 'non-economic', has led to increasing policy focus on how these systems can be maintained.

The European Commission considers productivity to be the most reliable long term indicator of competitiveness, and the Scottish Government's aim of growing the output of the Scottish agri-food industry to £12 billion by 2017 is intrinsically based on a growth in productivity.

On 16th March 2011, the Scottish Government hosted a conference entitled "The Future CAP for Scotland" in order to help develop Scottish policy on the future CAP post-2013.

This Research Briefing outlines the results of a recently completed six-month Defra research contract aimed at measuring technical efficiency by farm type within the UK and across a number of EU countries.

Most countries demonstrate a high level of technical efficiency across all farm types, indicating that, on average, farms operate near best practice levels.

The primary purpose of farming is the production of food and non-food products for the market, but it is a diverse and complex industry that can have significant non-market effects.

SAC’s Rural Policy Centre suggests that agriculture is coping better with the present recession than many other sectors of the Scottish economy.

As the impact of agriculture on climate change is increasingly recognised, carbon footprinting has risen up the agenda.

Agri-food businesses do not operate in isolation.

The 2009 report, released in November 2008, draws attention to how the increasing worries about food security are forcing fresh appraisals of environmental policies and the degree to which we can accommodate the complex social and political demands of these changing times whilst still producing affordable food.