I should make a declaration of interests, as the goose issue affects my constituency. This is an example of how you get to experience everything twice in life; I experienced it as a minister and I now experience it as the member for Argyll and Bute, which has a severe goose problem.
I draw the committee’s attention to two important documents. The first is the Islay goose strategy, drawn up last October by Scottish Natural Heritage and others, paragraph 1.5 of which reads:
“The strategy is required for two reasons”,
the first of which is
“damage by barnacle geese on Islay is continuing at a level which causes serious agricultural damage. On-going high levels of damage threaten the viability of farming on Islay, which underpins economic and social viability as well as providing wider biodiversity benefits”.
In December 2014, shortly after the strategy was issued, there was a press release from RSPB Scotland, in which Stuart Housden was quoted as saying:
“We believe that the evidence base on which that cull is proposed is fundamentally inadequate.”
There was no cull. He went on to say:
“We fully acknowledge that grazing geese sometimes affect agricultural operations, but past experience on Islay has shown that, with barnacle goose numbers at their current stable level on the island, less destructive means of managing those impacts are available”.
Over 10 years or more, there has been an attempt to bridge the gap between those two positions. One position says that increasing goose numbers—even the current high numbers, which seem moderately stable—are entirely tolerable and create no difficulty, and the other position is that of those who are actually on the ground and running farms and crofts and who can see the damage that is taking place. The reality is that the damage remains considerable. Although I pay tribute to the Scottish Government for its continued attempts to ensure that there is a reconciliation of those positions, they have not been adequately reconciled, and Patrick Krause is quite right to draw attention to the fact that there needs to be more substantial action to protect the livelihoods of those who are involved in agriculture in the Western Isles, in Orkney to some extent, certainly in the Argyll islands, and now increasingly on the Argyll mainland, where the number of barnacle geese continues to rise. I rarely hold constituency surgeries in Lismore, Campbeltown, Kintyre or Gigha, or even further into Argyll, at which I do not get people telling me that the goose numbers are causing them considerable problems in the running of their farms or crofts.
The issue is not resolved. It requires considerably more work, and there needs to be a recognition that the convention that governs the matter gives a derogation to those farmers and crofters who find that their crops and livelihoods are being adversely affected. The right attitude to the petition is to take the issue back to the Scottish Government and to press it to get the widest possible derogation for agriculture, so that the existence of agriculture in fragile parts of Scotland is not put at risk by what is taking place.