Mark Dawson: G8 must act as two million children starve each year

I was also one of the 45,000 people who attended the “Big IF” rally in London’s Hyde Park and planted a flower in the vast field of flowers.

Each petal represented one of the two million children’s lives lost each year to hunger.

These lives need never have been lost as there is enough food in the world for everyone IF...

IF means that we need to make a change to end the scandal of loss of life through hunger. I have chosen to get involved with the campaign because I believe that it is possible to make the changes necessary to put an end to hunger.

This is not idealism; I have real hope. The leaders of the powerful countries of the G8 will be meeting in Northern Ireland today and tomorrow under David Cameron’s chairmanship. They have a fantastic opportunity to create a legacy from this meeting of a world where no one goes hungry.

Perhaps you may be thinking that this is not the right time to do this.

The world economy is in a mess and there are voices in Britain shouting that saving the poor from hunger and starvation is “unaffordable”.

However the credit crisis behind the world recession was certainly not the fault of the poor in developing countries. They do however feel the brunt of the economic downturn.

I support the changes called for by the IF campaign because they are morally vital and certainly not unaffordable. To term them as such would mean that they are a long way down a list of priorities. Some 825 million people go to bed every night hungry and two million children a year die due to hunger. How can this be pushed down a list of priorities? What could be more important? It is not because there isn’t enough food, it’s because of deep inequalities in the way that food is grown and distributed, rich countries not meeting their aid targets and tax dodging.

In this generation we have the chance to eradicate extreme poverty. If all of the developed countries followed the UK’s lead and gave a tiny fraction of their national wealth (0.7 per cent) to provide for the basic needs of food, water, health and education for the world’s poorest communities, then we would have a world without hunger. This is why I’m backing the IF campaign.

A key element of the IF campaign is the call for large, wealthy companies to pay fair taxation. All countries, including the UK, suffer from multi-national companies transferring their profits through tax havens, rather than paying a fair contribution in taxation. If anything, such companies make more of an effort to avoid paying tax to the world’s poorest nations than to the developed ones. They benefit from cheap labour and resources and then put little back into those countries to help them develop.

At the G8 this year, our leaders have the opportunity to implement a co-ordinated strategy to prevent large companies from avoiding paying tax. When millions of people are going hungry it’s the least they can do. We have to pay our taxes and so should they; this is why I’m backing the IF campaign.

The IF campaign calls on world leaders to address the issue of land grabs.

Every second, poor countries lose an area of land the size of a football pitch to banks and private investors.

It seems insane that, in countries where there are people who are starving, land is being converted from food use to grow crops to export as fuel. Often land is taken from communities with little consultation and no compensation. This injustice has to stop; this is why I’m backing the IF campaign.

Meetings of world leaders such as the G8 can seem remote. They are one news item amongst hundreds; a couple of minutes on TV or half a page in a newspaper. However decisions made at this year’s summit, and its follow-up meetings, can have a crucial impact on all our lives, including the lives of the poor and those two million children who face death from hunger and malnutrition in the next year.