Chamber and committees

I am sure that we will come back to that topic in later questions.

Thank you. Ariane Burgess can ask a brief supplementary question.

Thank you, Scott. Steve, did you have anything to add? I mean Steven—I beg your pardon.

Absolutely. That should have been considered as part of the Good Food Nation (Scotland) Bill that we are working on at the moment. I thank Steven Thomson for that helpful answer.

We move to questions from Beatrice Wishart.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the 13th meeting in 2022 of the Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee. Apologies have been received from Mercedes Villalba. I remind committee members who are using electronic devices to switch them to silent.

Our first item of business is a decision on whether to take agenda item 4 in private. Do members agree to do so?

Members indicated agreement.

Our second item is an evidence session on petition PE1490, on control of wild goose numbers. The petition, which was lodged by Patrick Krause on behalf of the Scottish Crofting Federation, was referred to the committee following previous consideration by the Public Petitions Committee and the Rural Affairs, Climate Change and Environment Committee in session 4, and the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee in session 5.

The petition calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to address the problems created by increasing populations of wild geese in crofting areas as a matter of priority, reassess its decision to stop funding existing goose management programmes and assign additional resources to crop protection and adaptive management programmes to ensure that the threat to the future of crofting is averted.

I am pleased to welcome to the meeting the petitioner,?Patrick Krause—I hope that I have pronounced his surname correctly. As this is the committee’s first consideration of the petition, I invite Patrick Krause to make an opening statement.

Thank you very much, Patrick. That has certainly given us lots of food for thought. When we look back, we will find plenty of briefings and committee papers that will inform us of a lot of the background, but I am sure that members have many questions.

You suggest that there are about 5,500 birds too many in Uist at the moment, which is very concerning. If we are talking about £25 per head for humane slaughter, that seems unreasonable.

You also said that there are now resident birds. Why is that? What has changed so that, rather than being visitors, they now stay there full time?

Thank you, Professor.

I know that this will sound like a premature request, but I am already aware that we are going to be tight for time. We have quite a few questions to get through. I ask committee members to direct their questions at the member of the panel who they think can answer the question most fully. If something has not been covered, panel members should indicate that they wish to come in to give their view, rather than our going through the whole panel. That would certainly help.

Did you have a further question to finish off, Karen?

Thank you. That is useful.

Are you aware of any biodiversity research that has been done on the islands? With the petition, the emphasis has been on protecting livelihoods—the grazing and the sustainability of agriculture—but the other direction in which to take it, as you have clearly set out, is to look at things such as the machair and the biodiversity loss when we move from having a sustainable number of geese to having twice three times more geese than agriculture can deal with, never mind the biodiversity. Has any work been done to look at the biodiversity loss attributed to geese?