Rwy'n rwy'n meddwl i'r next item of business, which is a statement from the First Minister on the Scottish Government's programme for government. I remind members that although we will move into a debate—in fact, three days of debate after this—this is a statement from the First Minister, therefore there should be no interventions or interruptions. I call on Nicola Sturgeon. Over the past 10 years, this Government has expanded free childcare, removed university tuition fees for students and abolished business rates for 100,000 small businesses. We have invested in the national health service, prescription charges and protected free personal care. We have built social housing at a faster rate than any other part of the UK, and we have placed Scotland firmly at the forefront of the global fight against climate change. Today, our unemployment rate is close to a record low. Youth unemployment is half what it was 10 years ago. Our hospital, A&E departments are the best performing anywhere in the UK, and crime is now at a 42-year low. As illustrated by yesterday's official opening of the new Queensferry crossing, the nation's infrastructure has been transformed. This is good progress, but it is time to take stock of our achievements, refocus our efforts and refresh our agenda.  Those challenges are considerable, but in each of them, we must find opportunity. This programme for government is our plan to seize those opportunities. To build the kind of Scotland we all seek—an inclusive, fair, prosperous, innovative country ready and willing to embrace the future—it is a programme to invest in our future and shape Scotland's destiny. Ensuring that we have a highly educated and skilled population able to adapt to the needs of a rapidly changing economy is vital to our future prosperity and our wellbeing. That is why improving education and closing the attainment gap is our number one priority. As of this summer, parents of all newborn children now receive a baby box. That box encapsulates an important principle—that all children, regardless of their parent's circumstances, deserve the best possible start in life. That principle is one that will follow the baby box generation as they grow up. They will be the first to benefit from our next transformation in childcare. We have already expanded early years education and childcare, but by the time the baby box generation reaches nursery, we will have almost doubled the amount of free nursery education that children receive. Over the next year, to lock in that expansion, we will guarantee a multi-year package of funding for local authorities to support the recruitment and training of staff and the delivery of new premises. To support private and third sector providers of childcare, we will also introduce rates relief for day nurseries. The massive expansion of nursery education is the first strand of our transformation of Scotland's education system. The second is school reform. A new education bill will deliver the biggest and the most radical change to how our schools are run that we have seen in the lifetime of devolution. It will give headteachers significant new powers, influence and responsibilities, formally establishing them as leaders of learning and teaching. Our premise is a simple but very powerful one. The best people to make decisions about a child's education are the people who know those children best—their teachers and their parents. Our reforms will be matched by resources. We will build on the early success of the new pupil equity funding so that, over time, more of the money that funds our schools goes directly to those in our classrooms. We know that the whole education system must work together if we are to see the kind of improvement in schools that we all want to see. New regional improvement collaboratives will be established to provide support to teachers, including access to teams of attainment experts and subject specialists. We will also reform the way that teachers are recruited and educated throughout their professional careers. We will introduce new routes into teaching to attract the highest quality graduates into areas and priority subjects and broaden the pool of talent that is available to our schools. Those changes will be underpinned by the new standardised assessments being taken by pupils in primaries 1, 4, 7 and S3 from this autumn. Those assessments will not raise standards in and of themselves, but they will help to ensure that parents, teachers, policy makers and the wider public have access to high-quality and reliable information about the performance of our schools. The third strand of the transformation in education comes beyond the school years. We are determined to open up university to all who have the talent to attend. We will therefore take forward the recommendations of the widening access commission to ensure that young people, regardless of their background, have an equal chance of going to university. To make sure that they get the help that they need, we will set out plans to reform student support based on the findings of the independent review that is due to report in the autumn. We will also ensure that those who take vocational qualifications have the opportunities that they need. In particular, we will continue to increase the number of modern apprenticeships to meet our objective of 30,000 a year by 2020. Across all three strands of reform in our nurseries, in our schools, and in our colleges and universities, we are driving change. Our clear purpose is to ensure a first-class education for all young people, no matter the disadvantages that they might face. That is my top priority, and I recommit to it today. A good education is important, of course, for its own sake. It contributes to the health, the happiness and the fulfilment of all of us as individuals. It is also vital to building a modern, successful dynamic economy. Last week, I set out our vision for the economy that we want to build. To succeed, Scotland must lead change, not trail in its wake. We must aspire to be the inventor and the manufacturer of the digital, high-tech and low-carbon innovations that will shape the future, not just a consumer of those innovations. To support innovation, we will increase Government investment in business R&D by 70%, generating an estimated £300 million of additional R&D spending overall over the next three years. To help businesses to increase their exports, we will appoint this autumn a network of trade envoys to champion our business's interests in key markets overseas. Our network of investment hubs, currently confirmed in London, Dublin, Brussels and Berlin, will be expanded to include Paris, maximising opportunities in France, our third biggest export market. The support that we provide on innovation and on internationalisation will be backed up by help for key growth sectors. Scotland has the potential to be a world leader in advanced manufacturing. Right now, we are investing £9 million in a new lightweight manufacturing centre in Renfrewshire. That is helping companies to develop a global competitive advantage in the manufacture of lightweight environmentally friendly materials such as titanium and carbon fibre. The centre is just the first step. Later this year, we will take the next step by confirming the location and the key partners for the new national manufacturing institute for Scotland, with work starting on site in 2018. A clear demonstration of our conviction that advanced manufacturing will be central to our modern economy. We will also support financial technology, ffintech, as a key growth sector. Our ambition is for this city of Edinburgh to become one of the top 10 global ffintech centres, so we will invest in the establishment of ffintech Scotland, an industry-led body that will champion, nurture and grow our ffintech community. We will continue to champion clean energy. The North Sea is potentially the largest carbon storage resource anywhere in Europe. The UK Government's withdrawal of support for key carbon capture and storage initiatives risks that potential. Westminster holds the key levers, so we will continue to press for the right policy and financial framework to be put in place. However, we will do more than that. I can announce today that we will provide direct Scottish Government funding for the feasibility stage of the proposed ACORN project at St Fergus in Aberdeenshire. Today's programme sets out the range of actions that we will take to support other highly successful growth sectors, from food and drink to tourism and life sciences. Sectors that, through their determination and innovation, are securing jobs now and for the future. However, I want to make specific mention here of creative industries, a sector that is important both for our economy and for our cultural wellbeing. We live today in a golden age of film and television production. Over the next decade, the opportunities for attracting investment to Scotland will be considerable. We have already increased support for the screen sector, and last month I was delighted to announce that the national film and television school is setting up a base in Glasgow, the first of its kind outside of London. However, I can announce today that we will go further and do what those working in the sector have asked of us. In next year's budget, we will provide an additional £10 million to bring screen development production and growth funding to £20 million a year. As well as supporting key sectors, we must support those whose ideas and ingenuity create new products, services, jobs and wealth. The entrepreneurial spirit that forged Scotland's reputation in the past must drive our success in the future. That does not just mean helping young innovators to start their businesses, it also means helping those businesses to scale up as well. Organisations such as Entrepreneurial Scotland, Elevator and Codebase are building the innovative culture and leadership ambitions of our people and our entrepreneurs. To complement that work, we will establish and fund a new unlocking ambition challenge. Each year, we will offer intensive support for up to 40 of the most talented and ambitious entrepreneurs to help them to bring their ideas to market and create jobs. Candidates will be chosen and supported by established entrepreneurs who will give their time and commitment. Across the economy, we are determined to have a supportive business environment. To promote that, we have reformed our enterprise and skills agencies. Next month, we will establish the new strategic board to be led by Nora Senior, the former chair of the Scottish Chambers of Commerce. Its task will be to ensure that the £2 billion each year that we invest in enterprise and skills is delivering exactly what our economy needs to grow and succeed. Highlands and islands enterprise has been successful in taking account of the needs of the north of Scotland. We will establish a new south of Scotland enterprise agency to champion the needs of that area as well. To ensure competitive taxes for business, we will quickly take forward the Barclay review of business rates, initial steps are included in this programme and an implementation plan will be published by the end of this year. We will also introduce a new planning bill to support the efficient delivery of the development of our community's needs, including vital infrastructure. Of course, a often very significant constraint faced by many businesses with growth potential is access to long-term patient capital. The Council of Economic Advisers has made clear the importance to our future economic success of continued infrastructure development, adequate finance for high-growth businesses and strategic investments in innovation. We have already taken steps to improve access to finance through, for example, the establishment of the Scottish growth scheme. However, if we are to succeed in raising our ambition even further, this is a challenge that we must do more to address. We believe that the time is now right to take a new approach on capital investment. I can therefore announce today that we will begin work to establish a Scottish national investment bank. Benny Higgins, the chief executive of Tesco Bank, has agreed to lead work on developing the bank's precise remit, governance, operating model and its approach to managing financial risk, vital steps that will see this new bank up and running and providing the patient capital investment that the Scottish economy needs for the future. Alongside this commitment, we will provide the infrastructure that is needed for Scotland to be a world-leading economy. We will complete the Aberdeen western peripheral route, deliver the electrification of the railway between Edinburgh and Glasgow, bring on-stream new and refurbished trains and continue to push ScotRail to meet the highest standards of performance. We will also do what Conservative and Labour Governments have failed to do over so many years. We will identify a public body that will be able to make a robust public sector bid for the next ScotRail franchise. Those and many more transport plans across the country will benefit our people and our economy. They will be matched by infrastructure investment for the digital age. Later this year, we will procure the latest phase of our project to deliver by 2021, next-generation broadband, to 100 per cent of residential and business premises. An investment that will be transformational for our economy in general and for rural Scotland in particular. That is a significant step, however we are determined to do even more. To encourage others to see Scotland as the place to research, design and manufacture their innovations, for us to become a laboratory for the rest of the world in the digital and low-carbon technologies that we want to champion, we must also become early adopters of them. We must be bold in our ambitions just as we have been in renewable energy. Let me set out today one area where we intend to do just that. The transition from petrol and diesel cars and vans to electric and other ultra low-emission vehicles is under way and it is gathering pace. We intend to put Scotland at the forefront of that transition. I am announcing today an ambitious new target. Our aim is for new petrol and diesel cars and vans to be phased out in Scotland by 2032, the end of the period covered by our new climate change plan and eight years ahead of the target set by the UK Government. As members will be aware, we do not currently hold powers over vehicle standards and taxation, however we can and we will take action. Over the next few months we will set out detailed plans to massively expand the number of electric charging points in rural, urban and domestic settings, plans to extend the green bus fund and accelerate the procurement of electric or ultra low-emission vehicles in both the public and the private sectors, plans for pilot demonstrator projects that encourage uptake of electric vehicles amongst private motorists and plans for a new innovation fund to encourage business and academia to develop solutions to some of our particular challenges, for example, charging vehicles in areas with a high proportion of tenements. We will also make the A9, already a major infrastructure project, Scotland's first fully electric-enabled highway. This is an exciting challenge and one that I hope all members and the whole country will get behind. It sends a message to the world. We look to the future with excitement, we welcome innovation and we want to lead that innovation. This ambition will help to stimulate economic activity, but it is also part of our plans to improve our environment and the quality of the air that we breathe. In the coming year we will introduce a new climate change bill that will set even more ambitious targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and ensure that we meet our obligations under the Paris Accord. Air pollution is a significant risk to public health. It is particularly harmful to vulnerable groups like the very young and the very old. We have already committed to the introduction of a low emissions zone in one of our cities by the end of next year, and we will confirm its location shortly. However, I can announce today that we will go further. We will work with local authorities to introduce low emissions zones in each of our four biggest cities by 2020 and in all other air quality management areas where necessary by 2023. We will also do more to support the circular economy and reduce waste. I can confirm today that we will design and introduce a deposit return scheme for drinks containers as an important part of our determination to tackle litter and clean up our streets. For the sake not just of our environment but of our health, we will also take further steps to support walking and cycling, active travel, by doubling the amount spent on it within Transport Scotland's budget from £40 million to £80 million a year. We will also introduce a new transport bill, which will include measures to improve public transport from provisions on smart ticketing to giving local authorities a range of options to improve local bus services. I have spoken a lot today about measures to support the economy. A successful economy also needs strong public services. The quality of our schools and hospitals, the safety of our streets and communities, the supply of skills and good housing and infrastructure are just as important as rates of tax in growing our economy and attracting investment to Scotland. Of course, our most cherished public service is the NHS. In the past 10 years, the budget of our NHS has increased by £3 billion and it is workforceed by around £12,000. To equip it for the challenges ahead, we will ensure that the NHS budget continues to grow. We will deliver at least a real terms increase in the revenue budget next year as part of our commitment to increase funding by a further £2 billion by the end of this Parliament. We will continue to develop the NHS workforce plan and we will also introduce a new safe staffing bill to make sure that we have the right staff in the right places. Increasing funding for the NHS is vital, but it is not enough on its own. We must also reform how it delivers care. We have integrated health and social care and over the next year we will take forward our health and social care delivery plan and continue to support a shift in the balance of care and of resources towards primary community and social services. That will not always be easy, but it is right and it is necessary. We will also expand our focus on the prevention of ill health. Over the next year we will deliver a refreshed framework setting out the next steps in our work to tackle alcohol misuse. However, we must match our actions on smoking and alcohol with bold initiatives in other areas too. In addition to our plans to tackle air pollution and boost active travel, I can announce that we will take forward a new strategy to tackle obesity, including measures to restrict the marketing of foods high in fat, sugar or salt. In the year ahead, we will also progress the implementation of our new mental health strategy, with its focus on prevention, early intervention and access to services. Part of the challenge for health services that the world over is to reduce unnecessary admissions to hospital. Providing more of the care that people need in their own homes or a homely setting is key to meeting that challenge. One of the Parliament's flagship policies, free personal care for the over 65s, was designed with precisely that purpose in mind, but there are some people under the age of 65 who also need personal care, for example those with early onset dementia or conditions like MND. The campaign for what has become known as Frank's law, named after Frank Coppell, advocates the extension of free personal care to the under 65s. The Scottish Government undertook to carry out a study into the feasibility of making this change. That study has been published today, and I am pleased to announce that we will now begin work to fully implement Frank's law. There is one further piece of health legislation that we will introduce in the next year. The organ and tissue donation bill will establish, with appropriate safeguards, a soft opt-out system for the authorisation of organ and tissue donation to allow even more lives to be saved by the precious gift of organ donation. Keeping people and communities safe is one of the most important responsibilities of any Government. In Scotland today, crime is at a 42-year low. However, the nature of crime and people's expectations of the police are changing. We will continue to ensure that our police and fire services are equipped for the challenges of the future. In particular, we will protect the front-line police budget and support the police as they modernise the way they work. Over the next year, we will also create a new criminal offence of drug driving, which will come into force in 2019. For some people, a period in prison, sometimes a lengthy period, is the only appropriate sentence. However, we also know that community sentences where appropriate are much more effective in reducing re-offending. Indeed, as a result of decisions that we took 10 years ago to reform our justice system and more community-based alternatives to prison being available, the reconviction rate is now at an 18-year low. However, we must now be even bolder in our efforts to keep people out of prison and reduce re-offending further. While sentencing is always a matter for the judiciary, I can announce today that we will extend the presumption against short-term sentences from three months to 12 months. We will commence this change once the relevant provisions of the domestic abuse bill are enforced to ensure proper protection for those who are victims of domestic abuse. We will also introduce a new management of offenders bill to extend the use of electronic monitoring in the community and enable the use of new technology where appropriate. In the coming year, the vulnerable witnesses and pre-recorded evidence bill will also be introduced to reduce further the need for children and other vulnerable witnesses to give evidence live in a courtroom.  I can confirm that this bill will ensure that people convicted of offences related to same-sex sexual activity that is now legal will receive an automatic pardon. The bill will also enable those pardons to apply to have such convictions removed from criminal records. Above all, this bill will right a historic wrong and give justice to those who found themselves unjustly criminalised simply because of who they loved. Ensuring justice for the victims of crime is an essential element of a fair society, so too is delivering social justice for everyone. Our aim is to make Scotland fairer and more equal. Over the next year, we will continue our work to build a Scottish social security system based on dignity and respect. The social security bill will complete its passage this parliamentary year and, in the next few weeks, we will confirm where the new social security agency will be based. Next summer, we will deliver the first of the new devolved benefits and increase carers allowance. The increase will be backdated to April 2018. We will also prepare for the delivery of the new funeral expense allowance and the new best start grant by summer 2019. The best start grant is particularly important. It will provide additional help for low-income families at key transitions in their children's lives and help to tackle child poverty. Our child poverty bill, which sets statutory targets to tackle child poverty, will also complete its parliamentary passage later this year. We have recently established the new poverty and inequality commission to advise and challenge the Government on further actions to reduce poverty, and we will now consider options to place it on a statutory footing. Among other things, we will seek the advice of the commission as we establish a new tackling child poverty fund. That fund will be worth £50 million over the next five years and will enable new approaches to be piloted or scaled up in the short term. Over the next year, we will also introduce a financial health check for low-income families and bring forward a new package of support for young carers. Tackling poverty, of course, involves many different approaches. I am extremely proud that Scotland is one of the first countries in the world to tackle so-called period poverty through the current pilot scheme in Aberdeen, and I welcome the cross-party support for that approach. We will consider further action to help women on low incomes across Scotland in light of our learning from this pilot. However, I can confirm today that we will provide free access to sanitary products to students in schools, colleges and universities. Some local authorities have already made this commitment in relation to schools, so we will work through COSLA and with other partners to consider the options for delivery. This Parliament is providing real global leadership on this issue, and we should all be proud of that. Although we must take a range of actions now to tackle poverty, we should also consider options for more fundamental reform in the longer term. One idea that is attracting interest, not just here but internationally, is that of a citizen's basic income. Contemplating such a scheme inevitably raises a number of practical issues and questions, not least around the current powers of this Parliament, and undoubtedly there are arguments for and against. However, as we look ahead to the next decade and beyond, it is an idea that merits deeper consideration. I can therefore confirm that the Scottish Government will work with interested local authorities to fund research into the concept and feasibility of a citizen's basic income to help to inform Parliament's thinking for the future. One of the most important contributors to a good quality of life is housing. Good quality, warm, affordable housing is vital to ensuring a Scotland that is fair for this and future generations. Over the next year, we will make further progress towards our target of 50,000 affordable homes by the end of the Parliament. Our new planning bill will also help to secure the housing development that the country needs. We will continue to work to improve the quality of our housing stock. A new warm homes bill will set a statutory target for the reduction of fuel poverty and we will introduce new energy efficiency standards for the private rented sector to improve the quality of accommodation and help lower fuel bills for those at many of them young people who rely on privately rented accommodation. Scotland has a good record on housing. We are building social housing at a faster rate than any other part of the UK and we have protected social housing by removing the right to buy. However, as Westminster austerity and welfare cuts take their toll, we are seeing worrying signs of an increase in homelessness and rough sleeping. We are not prepared to tolerate that. Let me restate today a conviction that I hope will unite all of us. It is not acceptable for anyone to have to sleep rough on our streets. We must eradicate rough sleeping. However, in setting that national objective, we must recognise that it requires more than just housing. Every individual has unique needs and challenges. We will therefore establish a short-life expert group to make urgent recommendations on the action, services and legislative changes that are required to end rough sleeping and to transform the use of temporary accommodation. To support its recommendations, we will establish a new £10 million a year ending homelessness together fund and we will invest an additional £20 million a year in alcohol and drug services to help to tackle some of the underlying problems that so often drive homelessness. In tackling the challenges of building a fairer Scotland, national government can do a great deal, but often the best solutions are found by communities themselves. That is why we will continue work to empower communities across the country. Next year we will launch a comprehensive review of local governance ahead of a local democracy bill later in the Parliament and we will continue to work with local authorities to ensure that at least 1 per cent of council budgets are controlled by communities themselves. We will introduce a Crowny States bill to establish a framework for the management of assets and ensure that local communities benefit from the devolution of those powers. We will continue to implement the 2016 Land Reform Act and shortly approve the first strategic plan of the new land commission. It will outline a programme of research to inform options for future change, for example possible measures to tackle constraints on the supply and cost of land for housing and possible tax and fiscal reforms, including the potential for some form of land value-based tax. Scotland has a well-earned reputation as a leader in human rights, including economic, social and environmental rights. We will therefore oppose any attempt by the UK Government to repeal the Human Rights Act or withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. I intend to seek independent advice to help us to ensure that all existing and where appropriate future rights guaranteed by EU law are protected in Scotland after Brexit. We will take forward the actions in our Fairer Scotland for disabled people strategy, publish a new race equality action plan, progress the gender representation on public boards bill, work with the TIE campaign to tackle LGBTQ bullying in schools and consult on reforming the gender recognition laws. Of course, next year is our year of young people. Scotland has always taken a progressive approach to the welfare of children and young people in the criminal justice system. The children's hearing system remains a jewel in the crown, but in the year of young people we will go further. We will introduce a minimum age of criminal responsibility bill to increase the minimum age of responsibility from 8 to 12, in line with international norms. I can also confirm today that while it is not our proposal and indeed it may be an issue in which parties will give their members a free vote, the Scottish Government will not oppose John Finnie's proposals to prohibit the physical punishment of children. It is worth noting that approximately 50 countries around the world, France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the Republic of Ireland, to name a few, have already successfully made this change. Finally, over the next year, we will consider how to further embed the principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into policy and legislation, including the option of full incorporation into domestic law. Of course, Brexit will provide the backdrop to much of what we do over the next year. We are determined not to allow it to stand in the way of the ambitious programme that I am outlining today. However, we are equally determined to protect Scotland's interests. The UK Government's EU withdrawal bill represents a power grab. It seeks to replace EU law in devolved areas with unilateral Westminster decision making. That is simply unacceptable. As it stands, the Scottish Government will not recommend to this Parliament that we approve the bill. We will continue to seek the agreement of the UK Government to amendments that will address our concerns. However, in case that proves impossible, we are also considering the option of legislation in this Parliament to secure the necessary continuity of laws in Scotland. We will also continue to argue the case for continued UK membership of the single market and customs union. Leaving either will have deeply damaging consequences for our economy and our wider society. As I said in June, we will consider again the issue of a referendum on independence when the terms of Brexit are clear. However, in the coming months, we will publish a series of evidence-based papers setting out how enhanced powers for this Parliament in key policy areas will allow us better to protect our interests and fulfil our ambitions for the country. Those papers will cover immigration and its importance to our economy, welfare, employment and employability and trade. We will seek to work with other parties and with Civic Scotland to build a consensus on the powers that this Parliament needs. Later this year, we will also publish our draft budget bill. The detail of our spending plans for next year will be set out then. However, there are two particular issues that I want to address today. First, I can confirm that we will lift the 1 per cent public sector pay cap. The pay cap, while never desirable, was necessary to protect jobs and services. However, with inflation on the rise, it is not sustainable. Our nurses, teachers, police officers and firefighters deserve a fairer deal for the future. Indeed, the need to recruit the staff that our public services depend on also demands a new approach. We will therefore aim to secure pay rises from next year that are affordable but which also reflect the real-life circumstances that our public servants face and the contribution that our public services make to the overall prosperity of our country. The budget bill process will also set income tax rates for next year. We will always exercise the utmost responsibility in setting tax rates, and we will not simply transfer the burden of austerity to the shoulders of those who can least afford it. However, I am also mindful that, as a minority Government, we must build alliances across Parliament in support of our budget. For all of us, it must be the interests of our public services, households and economy that drive our decisions. We know that continued Westminster austerity, the consequences of Brexit, the impact of demographic changes will put increasing pressure on our public services and on our ability to provide the infrastructure and support that our businesses need to thrive. The time is right, in my view, to open a discussion about how responsible and progressive use of our tax powers could help to build the kind of country that we want to be, one with the highest quality public services, well-rewarded public servants, good support for business, a strong social contract and effective policies to tackle poverty and inequality. Ahead of the budget, we will publish a paper that will set out the current distribution of income tax liabilities in Scotland, analyse a variety of different options, including the proposals of the other parties across Parliament, explain the interaction between tax policy and the fiscal framework and provide international comparisons. The purpose of the paper will be to inform the discussions that we will have with other parties ahead of the budget. I give an assurance today that the Scottish Government will go into those discussions with an open mind and with the best interests of the country as a whole as our guiding principle, and I invite other parties to do likewise. Three bills of a more technical nature, the damages bill, the land and buildings transaction tax bill and the prescription bill will complete the 16 bills that make up our legislative programme for the year ahead. The programme that I have set out today, the policies and the legislation, is fresh, bold and ambitious. Because of that, aspects of it undoubtedly will be controversial. That is inevitable. Indeed, it is necessary. No-one has ever built a better country by always taking the easy options. As we debate this programme in the days, weeks and months ahead, members will focus on and scrutinise individual aspects of it. That is right and proper. However, I invite Parliament and indeed the public to see this programme in the round. It is about equipping Scotland, not just for the next year but for the next decade and beyond. At its heart is this ambition to make our country the best place in the world to grow up and be educated, the best place to live, work, visit and do business, the best place to be cared for in times of sickness, need or vulnerability and the best place to grow old. I commend this programme for government to Parliament.


Hi, I'm Tof Allen. I'm an epidemiologist and I guess director of data science on EcoHealth Alliance's technology and data team and I'm excited to be here talking to you all. I'm going to try and go pretty quickly because I went over and won for my rehearsals. So EcoHealth Alliance is a New York based nonprofit and we do research at kind of the intersection of public health and conservation, mostly studying emerging infectious diseases, a more big multi-disciplinary organization with field ecologists, public health specialists, and you know modeling analytics team and then this software team that I kind of co-steer. And yeah, our team works largely on machine learning applications for biosurveillance but we're interested in data integration too. So I'm going to hit on data sharing and data integration and kind of what that is. Talk a bit about tabular metadata and ontologies and then talk about what we're what this proposal that we're submitting is about. So data sharing is is going way up and this is a good thing. I went and looked at this 2014 blog post on the our open-side blog and so this is the number of packages on the Dryad repository and these are packages, datasets with associated papers and yeah, they're going way up and this blog post was in 2014 so yesterday I went back and looked and there are a lot more now. It's increasingly becoming the norm to share your scientific data publicly and this is driven by a bunch of different factors including good infrastructure built up around hosting data in repositories and the growth of data sharing mandators from publishers and funders etc. And in a scientific context, open data is a really good thing. A lot of its value derives from the ability to join multiple datasets together meaning that you can run comparisons or meta-analyses or studies with greater power because you can have new datasets or add other variables. And on a more philosophical level, I guess it means that it would be nice if data is all going into this kind of big shed effort but that's not really the case as it stands because just because data is available doesn't mean that it's integrable. I saw a really good breakdown once about the barriers to data integration and that defined them as you need to have stuff in the same place and so this is kind of a problem that's solved with you know data sharing being such a big thing now. You need to have your information in the same structure so this is file format, this is you know is it aggregated to the same level and then you need to have the same thing described in the same language. So semantic incompatibility is kind of a big sticking point and what semantic incompatibility basically refers to is you have something say this island here and you have a ton of different ways that you could refer to it. You might have an official or a short name in the same language, you might have different languages, you might have a set of one of many types of standard codes, you could have some proprietary codes or a set of coordinates or even just a reference to a shapefile and a hard drive and this leads to some I guess anti-patterns in data analysis so say you have a bunch of country level indicators that you need to run analysis of and they're from different organizations you know they might they might look similar but you wind up having a fair amount of fairly messy fairly ugly spaghetti code to get them to work together and then you wind up writing functions to score how good a match different things are and then when you have another project you can say indicators you tell your research assistants no don't go download these just use the script I wrote to merge these before because it works. So thinking about the barriers to data integration and the solutions you've got the data availability problem solved in data agreements and ways to transport files around you have the structure problem solved by the growth of software ecosystems and practices for tidy data essentially which make that much easier to reconcile and the way that you get around semantic incompatibility is annotate your tabular data with links to ontologies because then you can integrate your data set through ontologies so just around the same page when I say ontology I'm referring to like a structured dictionary that documents meaning in a certain domain so say I'm an ornithologist and I'm collecting sightings of swans in a CSV file and that tidy sightings I guess by day and I want to integrate another data set that another researcher created and this as you can see in these two data sets the swan species are referred to differently and you don't want to just rename them because you know that's not going to generalize so if you go and found if you went and found an ontology of swans you might want to call it a swantology and and you annotate your data linking it to the swan ontology then after you've done that that's the hard part after you have that link there conceptually at least it would be relatively simple to get your data to work together and to actually get this to happen a lot of the pieces that you would need are in place so you have your there are standards published by the web consortium about how to represent tabular data and metadata and in fact this particular standard CSV on the web one of the editors of the spec named Jenny Tennyson gave a presentation at last year's CSV conf about that one of the ways that this defines to encode your metadata is to have your CSV file and to have a side car metadata file and this degrades nicely because if you don't have the software to read the metadata file you still at least have a CSV and the metadata file is in JSON for links data so where a plain JSON file would just have a bunch of data in it JSON LD gives that data but also links to a schema that says what you're meant to expect what the structured bits of what the bits of data and what they should look like so JSON LD and CSV on the web a part of the semantic web set of standards there are a bunch of these RDF schema is another one and this family of standards also includes a way to publish ontologies which are key so our web ontology language is already used by groups like bio portal which is a project of the National Center for Bio ontology and Stanford University this is a centralized ontology I guess repository it focuses on very broadly defined biomedical ontologies so this includes you know cancer terminology but also place names and a sister project the Center for Extended Data Annotation and Retrieval they're working on tools including some like metadata recommenders which and they're mostly focused on laboratory data so data repositories like data one are also part of the kind of data sharing boom and they have support for a number of these kind of ontology and link data standards and they also have some interfaces that can help create them both both CEDA and data one are researching ways to predict structured metadata from unstructured metadata so say you have a textual description of a file or a paper accompanying a file they're working on ways to try and predict what ontology you might need to describe different bits of the file and they have some preliminary interface that's available on their website and on GitHub but despite all this despite the proliferation of standards and tools there's something missing because very few datasets have structured metadata still so these are two papers that if you're interested in this I recommend they're both from 2011 and they one is a survey of scientists and another is I guess an ethnographic study of a bunch of research sites which are implementing ecological metadata language I guess I would sum up their takeaway points by saying that many if not most scientists at least you know six years ago are unaware of metadata and metadata standards if there are tools to apply them and what the potential benefits of metadata would be and even for metadata savvy scientists annotation is is time consuming it best or impossible at worst because there aren't really many tools available to perform it and even when metadata is properly applied it doesn't really provide any immediate payoff to that workflow because again you're missing the tooling it's most likely uses for future projects other people and yeah I'll set you read this and so the compounding factors I guess I would say a lot of annotation when it does happen happens when you're getting ready to archive your data so at the end of a project you're getting ready to approach your repository and publish a paper and this means this means that scientists aren't likely to use metadata driven tools during the course of their research they I guess it also means that decisions about how you're going to structure your data or errors that you make will accumulate over the course of a project which means that when you actually go to apply metadata using the tools provided by repositories it's it's harder and also happens as you know you're scrambling to get stuff ready or you're shifting resources to your next project and yeah it just even a mandate is not going to help at this point so that's where we are right now and this project this proposal that we I guess we're in the process of submitting to the Sloan Foundation is about a set of tools that we want to develop to kind of bring an annotation forward in a project's lifespan because we figured that with the right set of tools you can reduce the effort and increase the incentive for scientists to annotate their data and I guess at the same time reduce workload and bring a bunch of those benefits that open data promises so there are two major parts to our plan I guess the first is you know we want to take our own shot at creating a metadata recommendation service using machine learning and heuristic approaches that we've used in in other projects that we've done and we also want to create interfaces graphical and command line interfaces that make it easier to apply metadata early in a data sets life cycle and make it easier to get some utility out of that metadata kind of have this virtuous cycle bring it forward lower the barrier and increase the incentives so with a metadata recommender service what we'd want to do is predict the metadata for a CSV file and do so in a kind of a two-step thing first you want to predict the column level ontology and then second you want to predict the cell level value and you we are going to try and do so based only on the contents of the table itself so we don't really want to rely on a paper having been written because otherwise it's not going to be useful for a random CSV file sitting around on someone's hard drive so essentially we want something that could yeah we want something that can prioritize amongst different ontologies and at least produce recommendations and you know have this package be something with you know usable API so that it can be useful even if the rest of the projects butters because you know that's good stuff and we want to you know train it on there's a bunch of existing data out there which kind of in the wild which might be useful for this so data one is already doing research into this sort of thing and they're already working on a recommender and we were chatting with someone from data one who's I forget who it was but anyway they pointed us to a repo that's linked here and they have a thousand datasets I think it is which are manually annotated specifically for the purpose of training these sort of algorithms now a lot of their approaches are getting pretty poor predictive power right now and there's no reason to think that you know we're going to have a silver bullet or do a better job than they are which is why I think the interface part is really key because good interfaces can make a really poorly predictive algorithm useful if it streamlines the process of kind of triaging recommendations and also if you hook it up right you can set up again a kind of a virtuous cycle where you're creating using kind of less good algorithms to create training data to make better algorithms so this is our tech teams main software projects kind of have done done this but in a different field so we're working on this piece of software called IDA Connect which is the emerging infectious disease repository and it's kind of doing knowledge-based population backed by machine learning and natural language processing and so it'll take text identify case and death counts and use those plus identified place names and dates to populate this schema for a spatiotemporal disease event but since you know we don't have training data to make it spot on 100% of the time right algorithm we work really hard to get this interface where a user can triage the suggested annotations and then we save that data in a way that it can be used by classifiers for kind of the next round of updates I think the interface is also important to give the user especially a non-technical user a really clear mental model of what's going on and here's that virtuous cycle I was talking about the graphical interface and the R package are also a good place for us to surface some of the useful functionality which I think properly annotated metadata would provide so writing out the sidecar metadata files is a great thing because other tools which write which read and write data in these standards can then make use of that I imagine you'd also want to be able to write out like a canonicalized version of a CSV file it would make it much easier to submit your data to a repository so there's not that mad dash at the end of a project and we could also provide verbs to operate on tables based on the semantic annotations for the metadata so like a left join based on the ontological value of your country column as opposed to the string value then we have our continuous integration setup which nom has been been a big proponent of and I think this is the part he's most excited about so the the continuous integration idea is essentially you set the software set the service to monitor a certain folder maybe in github or dropbox and the web service when it sees a change in in the data file there pulls up a report and maybe it emails you or could do a number of other things so it could automatically write back metadata files with recommendations above a certain confidence threshold or alert a user or give you nice little badges to put on a github repository essentially I think where we want to see metadata go in the next five years is to take it from the mad dash mandated task at the end of a project to be part of the procrastination yak shaving setup phase at the beginning of our project so to caveat this this is just a proposal we haven't done this yet but I I think this is where the field is going to go and there are definitely other people working on similar projects and you know we're super interested in collaborating on this sort of thing another caveat in this talk and in our proposal we're intentionally punting on some of the details I'm kind of being glib we're really defining stuff as out of scope because it gets really technical really quickly and a very layered problem and I think we're trying to focus to narrow our scope in a way to tackle a little bit at a time so I guess I want to thank Nome who has been a great help kind of crystallizing a lot of my thoughts around this and it's great to have a multi-disciplinary place to work at the Sloan Foundation hasn't funded us but they found a bunch of great things and it's nice to have an organization to pitch this sort of thing too and also it's really lovely to have a conference like this and an audience who's willing to come listen to me nerd out about stuff like this so thanks everyone


Hello everybody, welcome to the 2021 Hot Topics and Environmental Law Summer Lecture Series. I'm Jenny Rushlow, Director of the Environmental Law Center and Associate Dean for Environmental Programs here at Vermont Law School. We're pleased to welcome our viewers to our presentation today. Each one of these talks is worth one Vermont CLE credit, so please keep track of which talks you attend if you're looking for a CLE credit. We will have time for Q&A after the presentation today, so you can type any questions you have in the chat at any point during the lecture and we'll get to as many of them as we can in the remaining time. Today for our speaker, we are very pleased to welcome Professor Larry Behronevan. Professor Behronevan is the Director of the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems and a Professor of Law at Vermont Law School. She is an alum and received her JD from VLS in 2003 and prior to joining the faculty at VLS after a judicial clerkship, Professor Behronevan joined the faculty, or sorry, she was a staff attorney at Vermont Legal Aid where she represented adults and children in individual cases and class action litigation advocating for access to health care, education, equality and civil rights. She's also published a number of scholarly articles and book chapters that focus on the connections between human health and the food system. Her work has been cited widely and she's been quoted in many major news outlets. She's an appointed member of the Food and Drug Law Institute and Georgetown Law School's Food and Drug Law Journal Editorial Advisory Board, a founding member of the Academy of Food Law and Policy, and the Chair-Elect of the Agriculture and Food Law Section of the American Association of Law Schools, or AALS. Today Professor Behronevan will present a talk titled, Why the US Needs a National Food Strategy. Please join me in welcoming Professor Larry Behronevan. Thanks so much, Jenny. And I should say I was the Chair of the Food and Drug Law Section, but we now have a new Chair. So that's probably, I need to update my bio on the website. So great. I'm going to just talk to you all for a minute before I try to share my screen and pull up my PowerPoint, just to let you know the origins of this particular presentation and the project that this presentation is based on. So in around 2015, there was an op-ed that was published by a number of food system leaders, including Mark Bitman, Michael Pollan, Ricardo Salvador, Olivia Deschute, and some others that was calling for the creation of a US national food policy. And what they were calling for, some of you may have seen this in the Washington Post, what they were calling for was a really specific set of measures that were focused on amendments, potential amendments to the Farm Bill. And they just had very specific substantive things that they were calling for. So we, along with the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, secured funding from the Kellogg Foundation to basically write a blueprint for a national food strategy in the United States to think about what it would look like for the US to adopt a national food strategy. And that we deliberately stayed away from the substance. We wanted to focus on process. And we focused on domestic examples of other national strategies that had been adopted to address other big national issues. And then we also looked at a set of international, international-level food strategies to see what steps those countries had taken to be able to develop those. We published that initial report in 2017. And we published it just before the election. And we didn't see a lot of movement in the US pushing for a national food strategy following the publishing of that report. But we did actually in Canada. And the report wound up being really helpful to advocates in Canada who were thinking about how to structure conversations around process for building their national food policy. So in October of 2020, we published an update report, the urgent call for a US national food strategy, given the upcoming election and also what we had seen as some of the outcomes of COVID and how they impacted the food system. So what I'm going to focus on today is our update report. I'll make some references to the original report that we published in 2017. But by and large, I'll focus in on the update report. So let me share my screen. So on this page, these are basically just the covers of each of the report. On the left-hand side, you can see the February 2017 report. And then on the right, you can see the urgent call report that we published in October 2020. And normally I give this presentation along with one of my co-authors, Emily Bradley, about the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic. But I'm just going solo today. So I will probably focus in large part on the international aspects of our report since that's where we really focused our research. And I should also say a huge thank you to the many students that have been involved in this project and these reports over the years that we developed them. And also the LLM Fellows, one of which was Sydney Pence, who some of you may have heard last week give a presentation. So I thought I would start just by going through what the food system is. And some of you watching may not be familiar with the notion of what we mean by the food system, even if you've heard people use it in language. So basically, this diagram comes out of our report. And what's important to know about the food system. So you can see in the pictures going down, farm inputs, production, processing, and manufacturing, we think of all of those as the food supply chain. So when you're thinking about food moving from farm to table, these are the sort of traditional typical steps that food takes from farm to table. The food system is more than just the food supply chain. So the food system includes a number of factors that both impact and are impacted by the food supply chain. And we have those over to the right. So environmental factors, economic factors, health factors, and social factors. And what's important to know about the food system in the US is that it's governed by a really complex web of laws and regulations that involves government agencies, foreign and domestic stakeholders, community organizations that are advocating for policies that often conflict with each other, create redundancies, or sometimes increase inefficiencies. And so I'll walk through some of the different impacts that we see from the food system. So one major impact that we see from the food system is health impacts. And before COVID, diet related disease, which includes obesity, heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and various types of cancer was the most significant public health challenge facing the United States. And one thing we saw as an outcome of COVID was that individuals suffering from diet related disease had worse outcomes related to COVID than individuals who weren't suffering from diet related disease. And the rates of all of these diet related diseases have only climbed in the past few decades. So for example, at this point, nearly 10% of Americans suffer from diabetes today. More than one third are pre-diabetic, so meaning they're on their way to getting diabetes and we're talking about diet related type 2 diabetes, compared with less than 1% 50 years ago. So that's pretty significant. Another set of impacts that we see from the food system are environmental impacts. So we know that to produce food, some farmers and producers use pesticides and other environmental contaminants. Those wind up polluting our waterways. They deplete natural resources and they harm local communities. And I should say this also takes into account industrial animal agriculture production, which presents really serious harm to surrounding communities. And in the US, agriculture accounts for 80 to 90% of consumptive water use. It's also a leading cause of water quality impairment. And despite all of that, all of the resources that go into producing our food, 40% of the food that we produce in the US is either lost or wasted. And we're talking about either at the farm level or post farm level. And at this point, food waste now accounts for the highest percentage of organic waste in landfills. So that contributes further to human related methane emissions in the US. And then there are some other statistics that you can see here. So the environmental impacts of the food system are quite significant. In terms of economic impacts, even though food and agriculture contributes an enormous amount to our GDP annually, food system benefits aren't distributed equally across economic and racial groups. So if we think about the amount of money that farms are or the income that farms are realizing, 51% of farm production value comes from large scale farms that are making over a million dollars annually in gross income. Yet by contrast, small scale family farms account for only 26% of total farm production, despite representing 89% of all farms. So that means that really big farms that happen to make much more in income are actually dominating most of the production in the United States, even though we have a number of smaller farms that represent 89% of the farms in the US. In terms of racial disparities, if we think about farm subsidies and payments, white farmers received 98.9% of government farm payments according to the 2017 USDA Census of Agriculture, with only 0.6% of government payments going to farms that had Black or African American producers. And then other racial groups are similarly underrepresented in terms of receiving subsidies and farm payments from the USDA. And then finally, if we think about some of the impacts of the food system to the workers that work in the food system, despite being essential to the food supply, and I use this language being essential because food system workers and farm workers were deemed essential during the pandemic, yet they remain unprotected by most labor laws. And what we saw with COVID is that they also were unprotected in terms of receiving personal protective equipment, access to vaccines. So they've been unprotected for a very long time by most labor laws. We also saw them deemed essential and then left unprotected during COVID. Agricultural workers work in a very dangerous occupation. There's a significant risk for them for fatalities and injuries, work-related lung disease, hearing loss, skin disease, cancer associated with chemical use and prolonged sun exposure. And yet they don't receive many of the same workplace protections that workers and other protections do. Additionally, almost half of the 2 million migrant and seasonal farm workers in the US in that number is likely an underestimate because it's difficult to get the true count of how many migrant and seasonal farm workers there are in the US. Almost half of them are undocumented, which means that they're ineligible for government assistance, including the various forms that are stated on this slide. But also during COVID, when a number of individuals were able to receive unemployment or other benefits from the government, undocumented workers were also ineligible for receiving government assistance, unless the state that they lived in created legislation to directly make sure that they were going to be eligible for that assistance. And I'm proud to say Vermont is one of the states that did so. So we have all of these myriad issues presented by the food system. And I gave you a sense of those. I didn't give you all of the different issues that are presented by the food system. But basically what we argued for, both in the original blueprint and in the update report, was basically that there's a strong need for governmental coordination to solve these systemic food system issues. So we have any number of government agencies that deal with the food system, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture. You just heard about the immigration status of farm workers, which means that now we're talking about immigration. We're also dealing with international trade. The Environmental Protection Agency is involved when we're thinking about pollution and pesticides. And that's sort of just the tip of the iceberg. Homeland security plays a role in the food system. And we have all of these different agencies that play a role. And we have very few mechanisms that either require or encourage them to coordinate with each other. And the agencies that I just mentioned are all agencies at the federal level if you start to think about how that plays out at the state and local level. And then include tribal government. You basically have a whole host of bodies that are making decisions about the food system in many different ways that can have a tendency to cause inefficient or unintended consequences. If we think even just about food safety, there are 15 administrative agencies that deal with food safety alone. And that's just one single issue if we're thinking about the food system. Also, as you can see in this slide, there are a number of different committees in the house alone that deal with food policy. So you have agricultural subsidies and funding, food safety authority, and then school meals and food support for women, infants and children where you have three separate committees dealing with all three of those issues that are somewhat related. And it would make a lot of sense to have those bodies coordinating in addition to a number of other bodies. So our argument was basically that to be able to essentially address all of these systemic issues and to be thinking about them over the long term, we need some sort of mechanism in the United States that's causing agencies and government to coordinate around the food system. So the recommendations that we made in 2017 largely remain the same in our new report, although we added a couple of recommendations based on just what we had seen over the years since we had written the report and also in response to COVID. Our essential recommendations were that we need coordination. So there needs to be some sort of lead office or agency in the US that has resources, importantly. And also the authority to compel engagement across all of these different actors and action and creation of the strategy. We also felt that it was really important to have some sort of interagency working group that could coordinate the key offices and agencies that oversee the laws and regulations that shape the food system. And we also need to engage state, local and tribal government leaders as key partners. We also focused really heavily on participation and what participation looks like for food system stakeholders. So in the original report, we recommended that we create an advisory council that would engage vital stakeholders from outside government to help with strategy development so that it's not just government coming up with the strategy, but that you have a group of advisors that represent vital stakeholders in the food system that can help think about what the strategy should be. Also that there be an opportunity for stakeholders to provide feedback throughout the process and that government think really hard about how to engage in illicit stakeholder and public participation. And then to respond to that public input and explain why one course of action was chosen over another. This is actually a really important point because what we often see with decisions that impact the food system is that there are any number of trade-offs involved in decisions. And without knowing what the options are and why one course of action makes more sense than another or what stakeholders think about one course of action over another. We often make decisions that don't necessarily take into account what the long-term impacts might be. And then for accountability and transparency that there be public-facing reports, a written strategy document that the government is actually measuring progress against what the goals, metrics and expected outcomes were. And then that the strategy is durable so that there's periodic updating of this strategy and that that's built into the strategy itself to reflect changing social, economic, scientific and other technological factors. And one thing that we tossed around a lot and we still talk about is some sort of procedural mechanism like the one that's embodied in NEPA or the National Environmental Policy Act that essentially requires agencies to consider the agencies across the board not just environmental agencies to consider the environmental impacts of their actions so that that can help to guide agency decision-making that impacts the food system. So what we've seen since 2017 and we spent some time looking at this in the update report was basically to see what's happened since 2017 and like how have government agencies engaged in the food system started to coordinate and have they started to coordinate more? And what we saw is that for food safety and food waste in particular that there were a number of different interagency agreements and MOUs that agencies have entered into since 2017. What you can see though, if you look at this is basically these are like the same agencies and they're sort of the same major agencies that we often think of involved in the food system. So USDA and FDA dealing with basically having an agreement to bolster collaboration and coordination noting the fact that the GAO recommended that they need to do that and to have some sort of stronger commitment to having increased interagency communication and coordination. And then that they work to streamline produce safety requirements for farmers. So because USDA is often the agency that deals with farmers and agriculture but yet FDA has the responsibility for the Food Safety Modernization Act that the two agencies work together to make sure that farm inspections are more efficient and are actually effective at reducing instances of foodborne illness. A newer one was the agreement to coordinate on cell-based meat because the agencies were both in a bit of a argument about which agency was the right agency to regulate cell-based meat. And so this agreement came out of that to harmonize and get the agencies to coordinate. And then on the food waste side we see USDA, EPA and FDA entering into a couple of different MOUs. And while all of this is great while it's wonderful to see these governmental agencies making more gestures toward coordination all of these agreements and MOUs basically only involve a couple of different agencies three at the most. It's the same agency sort of over and over again. And they're limited, these agreements and MOUs are limited in their effectiveness because they're not taking into account a broader set of actors and externalities that impact the food system. And as you can see, if you take a look at these they're all on very discreet specific issues. So without expanding support for interagency coordination and making sure that there's a plan in place for them to actually coordinate MOUs and interagency agreements between two or three agencies in response to these narrow food system issues are not going to address the long-term systemic challenges that we see presented by the food system. And then I talked about a few slides ago. So I mentioned at the beginning of this presentation that most of the focus for us so we wrote this report with the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic the Harvard team focused on domestic strategies and other types of tools that we've used in the US to address issues of national concern. So some of those, one of the big ones was the national HIV AIDS strategy that we had in the US to address the HIV AIDS crisis. And one thing that we saw was in other countries when other countries were developing national food strategies it was often in response to some sort of national crisis. So we looked at both domestic and international strategies to see what lessons we could take from those in thinking about how to build a national food strategy in the US. And so one thing that was exciting to see was since our report in 2017, the UK who we actually cited to in the original report had at this point in July of 2020. So this was right as we were doing our research and writing announced part one of their national food strategy. And they had to pivot a bit. The UK was intending to release just a full national food strategy in July of 2020 but because of COVID, they essentially released their part one in response to COVID. And what we had seen about the UK is that the UK as a country has really valued, coordinated, comprehensive national strategies as a tool to address food system challenges. So this national food strategy came out of a longer set of discussions in the UK about how to address the challenges presented by the food system. And they also, what they referred to as it is is joined up food policy where they were basically thinking about who are all the different actors and agencies involved and how do we figure out how to get them to work together. And because the UK was leaving the European Union this was a good time for them to think about what it meant for them to address food system challenges as a country. So they have, even though they've been in a state of transition they've continued their focus on policy coordination and recognized that the pandemic provided the impetus for them to have a new approach to food system law and policy making. So they released part one of their strategy and it centered on two themes essentially. So one is addressing issues faced by the most disadvantaged children in the UK and that's the language that they used. And two, they were focused on sovereignty, trade and standards of quality. So that second piece, I think you can see the direct connection between that and Brexit because basically the UK was trying to think about how do we create our own national food system? How do we support our own national food system? And what standard of quality do we want food to measure up to in the UK? And how can we ensure that we're gonna have food that measures up to that standard? So the strategy has a bunch of different types of directives under the first category it's largely focused on expanding food assistance programs under the second theme the strategy suggested increasing import restrictions to prevent food from entering the UK that doesn't meet the UK's rigorous environmental and animal welfare standards. And the creation of a new set of core standards to be developed by a trade and agricultural commission in the UK. So the UK intends to release a part two of this report which will actually represent its comprehensive plan with recommendations for government in developing the overarching national food strategy. So that was one really positive development. So since 2017, the UK released part one of its national food strategy and it's at work on building out a more comprehensive national food strategy. The other really exciting development was that since our report was published, Canada actually developed a national food policy. So there had been a number of advocacy organizations in Canada, most prominently Food Secure Canada that had been pushing government to develop a national food policy for Canada. And so they did and created the food policy for Canada everyone at the table. And it was led by agriculture and agri-food Canada as the lead agency. We feel like because of, both because of its proximity to the US and also the similarity in the way that their government is structured. So they have a similar set of agencies engaged in the food system to us in the US that have a similar set of functions. So that to us, Canada feels like a really strong analogue for developing a national food strategy in the US. And one thing that's really notable about Canada's process, if we're thinking about it from a process perspective is how much they engaged the public. So in our report, there's a diagram that we pulled from, I think from the government's website that basically shows like how many listening sessions they had, how many people submitted public comments. They also worked really, really hard to engage the country's indigenous populations. So they had an online survey, they had a national summit that was focused on food policy. They had regional and local town hall and consultation events that were organized by different members of parliament. They had community events that were led by various civil society groups. And they had self led discussions through national indigenous organizations which was the preference of those organizations. They didn't wanna have to participate in something that they hadn't organized. They wanted to participate in their own conversations. And the online survey had 45,000 responses with 71.2% of those coming from the general public. And the consultations, the public consultations that were led with civil society focused on four themes essentially. So increased food access and food security which is an issue in Canada, it's also an issue in the US. It's an issue in most of the world, frankly, health and food safety, natural resource conservation and producing high quality food products. So you see a similarity with the UK there. So in addition to thinking about what had happened internationally, what we wanted to consider in this report was how COVID really highlighted a number of food system challenges in the US. And it feels a little bit like we're far removed from this or somewhat far removed from this. But at the time we were writing this report, the food system impacts from COVID still felt very real and very present and very current. It was still at a time when there were very long lines for people waiting at food banks to be able to get food. It was at a time when it was hard to get certain types of food and people weren't going to the grocery store. And the conversations around the food system were how do we think about rebuilding in light of everything that we've seen from COVID? And so many of these issues that were presented to those of us who work in the food system and are exposed to these issues regularly, these issues that were highlighted in the news and that people were talking about a lot more already existed before the pandemic at crisis levels. So we saw soaring rates of food insecurity and reduced access, disproportionate impacts to underserved and BIPOC communities, inadequately protected food system workers, staggering amounts of lost income for farmers and threats to farm viability, increased food waste, concentrated distribution networks and concerns about food safety. And yet all of these things from our perspective, even if the pandemic heightened the awareness of them among the general public, they already existed before the pandemic. And so the pandemic gives us an opportunity to really think about how to address them over the long term. And unfortunately, in part because of the lack of formal structures for agency cooperation, the federal solutions to the pandemic were piecemeal, incremental and responsive rather than being sweeping, strategic and proactive like we would have wanted to see. So in terms of the key elements of a national food strategy, you hear a lot of conversations about what the actual substance of the strategy should be, which is where we started this project from in the beginning, a bunch of food system leaders suggesting what the specific policy goals and priorities should be for a national food policy. But yet to us the strategic process is equally, if not more important and a needed first step. And I think as we've seen a lot of, at the same time that COVID was happening, we were seeing a number of calls for racial equity. And I think if you start to think about those two things in tandem, this strategic process of taking public input and really hearing from stakeholders and engaging stakeholders in the creation of the actual policy goals and priorities becomes even more striking than when we wrote this back in 2017. So from our perspective, if there isn't a thoughtfully designed process that's enabling broad representation and participation, then the national food strategy could suffer from some of the same issues that we face, in the sense that it excludes the perspectives of people that may have the most vital interests in the food system. And in terms of how we think that the process should happen, that having a government created national food strategy is still what we remain committed to. Because it's important from our perspective, it's important to us that there's government buy-in, that the government is going to actively encourage and create structures for the responsible agencies to coordinate and that these things will actually take effect in some way, whether it be through laws and regulations. But we added a couple other key elements to the ones that we included in the 2017 blueprint. So one was leadership. We added that as up in the first guiding principle focused on coordination. And that change reflects our understanding that effective leadership is just as important as agency coordination to the success of a national food strategy. One of the big takeaways that we had from COVID-19 and the response to the food system was that leadership was a vital element of effective response and the lack of leadership really made it difficult for agencies to respond to food system issues in COVID. In the food context, if we think about it from a state perspective, New York City appointed a food czar, Massachusetts appointed a food security task force, and both of those mechanisms created the leadership that was necessary to make an impact across all aspects of the food system. So developing a strong national food strategy will require identifying a particular individual leader or some sort of group of leaders that can provide effective and decisive oversight to the process. And then the second thing that we added, and we suggested this in terms of that there be a procedural mechanism, but we added to the update, the blueprint update, the need for proper enforcement mechanisms. Otherwise a national strategy would risk becoming little more than symbolism that has no teeth. So we updated the principles to include enforceability. We noted that the interagency working group on environmental justice, which we profiled in great detail in the original blueprint, featured cross-agency coordination, which obviously is something that we're pushing for strongly, but it lacked the power to issue enforceable regulations or to compel its member agencies to do so. And consequently, that interagency working group wound up being highly dependent on the executive, leaving it subject to the political whims of the president. From our perspective, a national food strategy should avoid that by ensuring it has a lead officer agency that can compel action by agencies that are participating for the strategy and pushes the agencies to create enforceable regulations and allows citizens the opportunity to hold government accountable. So finally, so this is the, this is basically the text of the end of our report. But from our perspective, after COVID, it felt like a really opportune time to push government to think about how to confront the inequities and the externalized costs that are rampant in the food system and also to address the critical economic, health, environmental, and social impacts. So from our perspective, there's no better time to do that than now. And that having a national food strategy allows us to do that efficiently and effectively and in a way that can be a long-term strategic solution to address the many food system challenges that we face. So thank you. I'm gonna stop sharing my screen. I think. Okay. Thank you so much, Professor Byronavan. That was a great talk. I do wanna remind folks that we do have time for Q&A. We have about 10 minutes. And for those of you in the audience, if you're watching on our website live stream, you click on the icon at the bottom of the video to bring up the chat box where you can add your question or if you're watching on the Facebook live stream, add your question to the comment box below and we'll get to as many as we can.  I'm wondering, have you conceived of this agency as a new agency that would oversee coordination or appointing an existing agency and is there precedent for an existing agency to be able to issue mandates for other agencies to do things as sort of an existing agency becoming a super agency? Yeah, that's a great question. Initially when we thought about it as we consider just having a lead office or agency be the body and not create some new agency that would be responsible for this. Now that I think about it more, and since 2017, one of the things that I really loved when I did this research, just because I dorked out on the research was that in the UK, they had this whole strategy unit that basically looked across government and was trying to figure out how to get governmental agencies to coordinate on any issue that was in need of coordination. And I was like, oh my God, that's so fascinating and something that would be so incredibly useful in the US, not just for the food system, but any issue that involves a number of agencies. Why not have a body that basically is going to the agencies and being like, okay, you guys need to coordinate and like, here's what you need to do and here's the various responsibilities that you all have. And what was really sad to me was to see that since we wrote that report that that body had been disassembled, basically. And what they realized was that agencies don't want to coordinate, which is like no surprise. They all have their own area that they want to regulate in and the things that they want to address and they don't want to deal with other agencies in doing that. And so as I thought about it more and I was thinking about it with this update report, I wonder from a really practical perspective, if you were to give this authority to an existing lead officer agency, if you create the same issues. So like, if you were to say to FDA, which isn't actually the right agency for this, you know, FDA does a lot with food, but it doesn't do a lot with the food system. But if you were to say to an agency like FDA, okay, FDA, you get to be the lead officer agency, like are all these other agencies that are responsible going to listen to FDA and are they actually gonna do the things that FDA is saying, even if FDA has the authority in some way to enable them to do that. So I do wonder if there needs to be some sort of new body that's created in the executive that in some way has the authority to be able to force all these different agencies to coordinate in some way and has some super authority, but you likely need an act of Congress to create something like that. I think and what we were pushing for was basically that Congress, we put out a number of calls to Congress to write legislation, essentially pushing for a national food strategy so that some of these mechanisms could be put into place. But I don't think there's any sort of like one single answer and it's sort of hard to know what the best structure is. I think they all, that's some of the follow-up research that we wanna do is to think about the pros and cons of very specific different types of approaches to do this. That would be really exciting to see. Yeah. Wonder about, there's so much activity that's happened in terms of food system, well, some activity that's happened in terms of food system planning and food system improvements at the state and local level, especially at the local level. And what you're proposing here is really a swing in the other direction to go as high as possible in the chain in terms of government. And I wonder whether this might create kind of an all or nothing approach that prevents incremental change because with so many stakeholders, it can be really difficult to agree on anything. And so that slows everything down. It makes me think of the Farm Bill and SNAP and how that makes it so, you know, Farm Bill's run so far behind because there are these difficult issues. And, you know, you talk about, one of the reasons for needing this coordination is to avoid externalities, but it's exactly because a process that would include externalities, you know, like impacts from subsidies to corporate farms and maybe unintended consequences to low income consumers, it makes it really difficult to move forward at all. So how do you envision avoiding gridlock with such a big process like that? Yeah, I mean, I think, so what we really was really valuable to us to see how the process unfolded in Canada and to see how they engage stakeholders and how they envisioned engaging stakeholders. One of the strategies that we looked at as an example for public participation was Brazil because Brazil essentially had these mechanisms where local, state and federal government all involved a high percentage of civil society and in creating food policies in Brazil, they had these advisory councils that included members of local, state and federal government to be able to create those. And we thought that that was an interesting model and a way to ensure that you're not losing some of the innovations that are happening at the state and local level. That was certainly a concern that we had about suggesting such a top down federal national type of strategy that people would be worried about losing the state and local innovations and momentum and even autonomy that's been happening in the food system for so long. I think what we're really focused on is developing a broad set of goals at the outset. So like really big picture goals like to reduce food insecurity by like X percentage if not completely by such and such year and to just have these really broad based goals that I think it's hard to argue against those as goals. And I think you will have, there will be some competition in terms of like which of those goals is sort of like the highest priority. But as a first matter, I don't necessarily see the creation of those goals creating so much gridlock. I feel like the gridlock will come in when you start to get into the details of like how is that going to happen? Like what are the steps gonna be to implement that? And that we envision being a really participatory process which you're right can result in gridlock but really like similar to notice and comment rulemaking so that there are, you know, proposals that are created that are sent out so the public has the opportunity to weigh in but ultimately the decision makers are gonna make a decision based on the comments and feedback that they get which I think ends up avoiding the gridlock that you're talking about. It obviously also means that like not everyone's gonna be happy 100% but it does mean that someone is authorized to be making decisions so that things can continuously kind of move forward and progress. Okay. Thank you. And then we're close to being out of time but one more real quick, really easy one for you. So food system issues can be tricky in terms of politics. You know, at least in my observation it tends to be a little more complex than just the classic partisan Republicans versus Democrats. And so since what you're proposing is pretty much entirely in the executive branch and we've seen about as dramatic a swing from president to president right now as we may ever see. So how do you protect against losing all that progress when it comes to election time? Yeah, that's something that we were worried about which is why we created the durability principle that we are the durability recommendation that we included in the original blueprint so that there's some way to ensure whether it be that there's legislation that calls for the creation of a national food strategy so that endures from president to president. That's also incredibly hard. Or that we at this point because we're at the beginning of a presidency that if a national food strategy was created now which we sort of feel like the time is now and agencies started taking some action in response to it it's not as easy to sort of just like undo the actions of the agency within incoming administration as it would be to just undo an executive order even if we had an executive order that created a national food strategy and then directed agencies to do specific things that the agencies start doing those things now and they continue to do those things for the next few years. I think a lot of that will be hard to undo with an incoming president. And we really see this issue as bipartisan that a lot of these things not only are gonna be good for the environment and good for public health which ideally you hope that those are bipartisan issues but we know that those can tend to fall across different party lines but also that this can be good for the economy and it can be good for regulatory efficiency which is certainly something that Republicans are in favor of as well. Okay, well thank you so much. It was great to talk with you about these issues and unfortunately we're out of time so we need to wrap up our talk today. Thank you so much Professor Beirut-Van for your presentation and thank you to everybody who joined us today. Our next Top Topics talk will take place here on June 17th at noon Eastern time and we hope you can join us then. Thanks everyone. Thank you.