Local Matters IV: Scotland's local solution to a global crisis

OurKingdom is running a short series of posts looking at various aspects of local government - you can read the series in full here.

Mike Small (Fife, Bella Caledonia): We are obsessed by food. We should be - because we have a serious problem. As Raj Patel points out in his new book "Stuffed and Starved" unless you are a corporate food executive, the food system isn't working for you.

If you are one of the world's rural poor, dependent on agriculture for your livelihood and suffering from massive price rises (and roughly half the global population of 6 billion fall into this category), you are likely to be one of the starved. If you are an urban consumer - from rich metropolitan to slum-dwelling labourer - you are likely to be one of the stuffed, suffering from obesity or other diet-related ills.

Patel's book examines this paradox. His simple idea is that the simultaneous existence of nearly 1 billion who are malnourished and nearly 1 billion who are overweight is the inevitable result of a system in which a handful of corporations have been allowed to capture and control the food chain.

Unsurprisingly, the stuffed have had more solutions at their disposal than the starved. We've had whole foods and slow food, fast food and organics. We've had road food, and freeganism, Masterchef and Naked Chefs. The F Word and the Atkins.

Now - the Fife Diet. But this diet is slightly different: it's not actually about YOU any more.<!--more-->

"What I stand on is what I stand for" said the American writer Wendell Berry as he searched for meaning and value in rural America. It's this sort of thinking that inspired our local diet, in which we only eat food from our region for a year.

The project has created a swarm of media interest. The question that each and every journalist dumbly asks is: "Why are you doing this?"

As the global food crisis begins to unfold, the response becomes more obvious: "why aren't we all doing this?"

The Fife Diet isn't practically difficult. All we are doing is what everyone was doing for centuries, what was up until a few years ago the absolute norm.

But it is politically difficult. There is a catastrophic failure of political leadership at a UK level - a failure which creates the need to do things from the bottom up. Starting small, we plan to expand into a food buying collective that can buy crops and other produce in bulk - and hopefully lower costs. This collective will become a grower, expanding its membership and sharing produce. Change can spread in a way that will never be achieved by UK wide politics.

However - now the relationship between energy and food is becoming ever clearer - change must come from politics as well. And here devolution has created new opportunities for other areas of leadership.

The head of the National Grid, Steve Holliday, met Alex Salmond last week, who has been a vocal critic of the existing charging regime - which makes it more expensive to put power into the grid in the very northern climes where renewables (such as a wave and offshore wind) will be generated. He came with a firm commitment to two major undersea power cables off the west and east coasts as a way of linking future renewables to a European sub-sea grid.

As the Climate Change Bill goes through the Scottish Parliament, "Scotland's Oil" is being replaced with "Scotland's Wind" as the mantra for thinking nationalists. I will leave it to the WWF to sum up:

this may be the most important piece of legislation in our lifetime. It could establish our nation as an international leader in tackling climate change, helping secure the future for millions of people and giving hope for species threatened with extinction.