Campaigners from the group ‘Enough Food for Everyone IF’ have installed a giant ‘Sold’ sign on Arthur’s Seat, in a bid to raise awareness of land-grabs in Africa, Asia and Latin America which lead to poor families being evicted from their farms and unable to grow sufficient food to support themselves.
The ‘stunt’ comes in the run up to this month’s G8 meeting in Northern Ireland, and the group are calling on G8 leaders, under the presidency of Prime Minister David Cameron to give people in developing countries more control over their land by protecting poor families from Land-Grabs and using land to grow food not biofuels.
Arthur’s Seat / Holyrood Park was chosen to highlight that an area of this size is lost to corporate land-grabs every 20 seconds, whilst land, 26 times the size of Scotland was sold off globally in the world’s poorest countries between 200 and 2010, enough to grow food for a billion people, equivalent to the number who go to bed hungry every night.
Campaigner Val Morgan, speaking from Holyrood Park spoke to the Edinburgh Reporter:
The IF campaign is also calling for the G8 to clamp down on tax havens and launch a Convention on Tax Transparency to stop the billions of pounds that flow out of developing countries that could be used to end hunger.
The campaign group is made up if more than 200 organisations making it the largest civil society movement since Make Poverty History in 2005.
Philippa Bonella, a spokesperson for the IF campaign said:- “Hunger is the biggest scandal of our time. It is unacceptable that when there is enough food for everyone, one in eight people on the world still go hungry and a child dies every 15 seconds because they don’t have access to enough nourishing food.”
“We are asking G8 leaders to show they have the political will to tackle the root causes of hunger. The decisions they make when they meet in Enniskillen shortly will determine whether millions of people across the world will suffer and die unnecessarily. They can prevent this by taking concrete action to put an end to land-grabs which see poor farmers evicted from their land so big businesses can make huge profits by growing biofuels for our cars and not food for those in need. The G8 leaders should also clamp down on corporate tax evasion which sees developing countries lose billions of pounds in lost money which could be used to combat hunger.”
G8 Leaders will meet in Enniskillen on 17th/18th June and over 200 Scottish campaigners will travel to Belfast for a major rally on Saturday 15 June.
You can sign up to the campaign at www.enoughfoodif.org
John graduated from Telford College in 2010 with an HNC in Practical Journalism and since then he worked for the North Edinburgh News, The Southern Reporter, the Irish News Review and The Edinburgh Reporter. In addition he has been published in the Edinburgh Evening News and the Hibernian FC Programme.
