HUGH RAVEN

It's good enough for Canada, Australia, Norway, Sweden and Finland. So we're to have one, too: the government is preparing to develop Scotland's first food strategy. Richard Lochhead, the Scottish Government's Rural Affairs Secretary, intends to unveil it at the Highland Show next June. It's planned to span the whole food chain.

The minister wants this to be an open process. That's an invitation we can't resist. Here are some things the strategy must contain.

Sustainable development must be the lodestar. Nothing new in that: the government is signed up, through Scotland's sustainable development strategy, Choosing Our Future, to make this the organising principle of all its activities. The very universality of food - the shared experience, the daily necessity, the breadth of the impacts - makes it a case study of how sustainable development thinking should be applied to public policy.

It's also exactly the principle the Soil Association applied in our recent deliberations on air-freighted food. Though we were under pressure for environmental reasons to remove our organic symbol from food imported by air, we also had to weigh the economic and social development benefits for low-income countries of producing valuable fresh crops for export. Our way through this - to insist those benefits are shared fairly, through mandatory ethical or Fairtrade certification on air-freighted organic imports - balances the environmental with the social and economic imperatives.

Given the economic importance of food and farming to Scotland, it is perhaps surprising we don't have a strategy already. Between them, food and drink manufacturing contribute in excess of £7.5bn to Scotland's economic activity. Primary output - agriculture and fishing - adds a further £2.5bn. Food and drink production and processing employ around 122,000 people in Scotland - about 5% of our total workforce.

Whisky exemplifies well the direction the strategy should take: quality, high-end, differentiated and branded. There's no earthly point in Scotland trying to compete on the world's commodity markets. We shall never beat Argentine beef or Ukrainian cereals on price. Scotland's reputation for the purity of its natural resources is its unique selling point, and when attached to food and drink, Scotland is an invaluable brand.

While we may be known for our unpolluted hills, in the area of public health we have a less enviable reputation. By almost any measure, we're near the bottom of the table. From an economic viewpoint, the emphasis should be on our characteristic foods that are important to a healthy diet: more oatcakes and oily fish than fizzy drinks and chocolate biscuits.

Not that we need an economic justification for tackling Scotland's public-health problems. The misery of diet-related ill-health is cause enough. Diet has now overtaken smoking as an avoidable cause of cancer, according to Scotland's chief medical officer, Harry Burns. Changing a nation's food culture is notoriously difficult, but where it is tackled with real persistence and determination, there is now good evidence that it can work. Finland is a case in point. Having had diet-related health statistics similar to Scotland's, Finland's public health record is improving as the long-term benefits of better food policy work through.

GPs frequently comment on the extreme difficulty of persuading middle-aged, overweight patients to lose weight. The government has a much bigger role here than it has yet acknowledged, by early intervention and helping to set individuals' consumption patterns for life. The Scottish Government has £85m per annum at its disposal in the form of the public food procurement budget. The rhetoric about spending this sustainably is all very fine, but there's widespread confusion about what is and what is not permissible under EU public procurement rules. If you ask Scotland's 32 local authorities what they can and cannot do in specifying procurement of unprocessed, local and organic food, you'll get almost as many answers.

The government can't be allowed to shirk this any longer. The food strategy must be accompanied by clear guidelines on healthy and sustainable public procurement, and the good work already under way on school meals must be extended to all public canteens, hospital kitchens and the Scottish Prison Service.

Spending the public pound more wisely is important, but it is not the whole picture. Changing Scots' food decisions in their homes is even more pressing.

We're familiar with Glenn, the kilted beefcake beaming across the message that we should eat more red meat. Curvy and moustachioed models transmit similar signals about milk. Why aren't the same advertising and leadership skills used to promote a healthy and balanced diet?

Perhaps we could encourage football stars to help get across the message that a fit body needs a healthy diet. Celtic Football Club leads the way already, with the chefs in its function suites choosing unprocessed, local and organic ingredients to prepare healthy meals in its children's restaurant. Kilmarnock FC has just won a prize for the quality of the pies it sells on the terraces. We know what enormously powerful role models sports stars can be. I'm sure many of them would be only too pleased to lend their name and fame to a government campaign for healthy eating.

The food strategy must also tackle the almost uniquely large environmental footprint of our food system. For wildlife, few if any human activities are more important than farming: the large majority of Scotland's surface area is farmed, and wildlife-friendly management, such as organic farming, needs much more government support. Nor does any other activity have a greater impact on the quality of our natural resources - water, air and soils, each of which provides services to Scotland's people of immeasurable value.

But even more urgent is the need to bear down on the greenhouse-gas emissions from food and farming.

Government figures show that 12% of Scotland's greenhouse-gas emissions come from farming. That's hugely disproportionate to its economic importance. The food industry - processing and distributing the products of farming - accounts for about the same again. Add in Scotland's soils - which contain almost inconceivably large quantities of carbon and, if badly managed, have potential to release it in megatonnes - and you have global warming potential at least equal to any other industry.

The government has announced its intention to legislate for an 80% reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 - probably the most ambitious climate change abatement programme in the world. It should be cheered to the echo for that commitment - but it's one it cannot possibly reach without changing fundamentally the way we produce, process and distribute our food. These three areas - the economic, the social and the environmental - represent the three legs of the sustainable development stool. That's no accident. Few areas are more important, or have further-reaching ramifications for all three of the sustainable development criteria, than a nation's attitude to food. If it tackles these with guts and determination, the government will have a food strategy worthy of the name.