The world produces enough food for its 7 billion inhabitants, yet the stark fact remains that 1 in 8 of these will go to bed hungry tonight. Even with advances in education and health, 2 million children still die of malnutrition each year.
We share one planet with all humanity and we can not rest while such unfairness prevails. Despite our real and pressing economic problems on the Island, no Manx child need go to bed hungry tonight.
June 2013 will see the UK host and chair the summit of the G8 countries. This offers an opportunity to press these most powerful nations to make decisions which will make a real difference to the lives of the hungry. In the light of the successful ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign in 2005 when the UK last hosted the G8 summit, a broad coalition of organisations has again come together to jointly campaign on this issue. The campaign is called ‘Enough Food For Everyone IF’ - for details see www.enoughfoodif.org.
On the Island, we want to play a part in this movement. The IoM won’t have a seat at the G8, but we can nevertheless help through our overseas aid programme. We believe this fund is spent effectively, much of it (one-third of projects funded in 2012) on programmes which alleviate extreme poverty and hunger by focussing on sustainable agriculture and livelihoods. So we do well - but we can do more. At ?2.4m for the current year, aid represents only 0.07% of our national income. This contrasts with the UK which will finally achieve the UN target of 0.7% in 2013-14. Even Greece manages proportionately to give twice as much as us (0.15%). Specifically, we ask our Government to look again at this and commit to raising our aid giving to 0.1% for 2013-14. By doing so we can show that, even in relatively hard times, we take our global responsibilities seriously.
