THE founder of the Keep Scotland the Brand campaign has appealed for people to tell MPs about the importance of Scotland’s brand identity.

Ruth Watson wants Scots everywhere to tell the Scottish Select Committee at Westminster why they should Keep Scotland the Brand.

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The committee, made up of a cross-party group of MPs, is taking evidence for its current inquiry into Scotland and Brexit: Trade and Foreign Investment.

Covering Scotland’s future trade relations both domestically and around the world, the inquiry also will explore the way in which Scottish businesses are promoted.

The committee, chaired by Pete Wishart, the SNP MP for Perth and North Perthshire, will accept evidence until the end of June.

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“Scotland’s brand identity is crucial to our rapidly-growing food and drink sector,” said Ruth Watson. “Local provenance is good for global sales.”

She continued: “Our farmers work very closely with Scotland’s vets and scientists to produce food and livestock which is recognised as being top quality around the world. Other nations want to buy our goods and our skills because they know they are buying premium produce and expertise. This iconic brand recognition is being threatened by the Scottish origins of our food being subsumed under a blanket ‘British’ label – something which many producers in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland also are concerned by. We must stand up for our farmers, fishers, food and drink producers as we face the loss of Protected Geographic Indicators [PGI], the system of protecting our iconic foods from ‘identity theft’.

“Both the Americans and the Peruvians say they want the right to call their whisky ‘Scotch’ as part of post-Brexit trade deals.

“The Australians want to export their ‘Scottish fillets’ – beef pumped full of growth hormones and other additions currently banned by EU regulations – to our shelves.

“The Americans recently said they expect our standards to come down to meet theirs and that labelling should not allow for discrimination between our food, with its higher standards, and theirs.

“We cannot allow that to happen. Keep Scotland the Brand is all for trade with, to, and from other nations but it cannot be at the expense of food standards.

“Are we to end up with a nation which is reliant on imports but only the wealthy can feed their children food grown and produced to high standards, which currently is the norm?”

Watson added: “There is great concern about the future of our rural communities if our brand identity is lost, or traded away.

“What happens to our rural communities, our rural landscapes, our pricing structures in supermarkets, our tourism and hospitality sectors if our farms fail and either are concreted over for housing or sold to large estates and big business? Scotland IS the brand and there are many reasons we think it is worth safeguarding.

“Local livelihoods, our food security, depends upon it. Please encourage businesses, customers, your MP, everyone, to make a submission to the Select Committee.”