To many people, the developing world is an earnest Lenny Henry in a sparkly suit. Comic Relief has done good work in raising cash for the third world on one day each year but never mentions the lifestyle changes we could make to help alleviate starvation every day of the year. Going vegetarian!

Hunger is a massive global problem and is about to get much worse. One third of the world doesn’t have enough to eat yet the population is set to rise from 6.5 billion in 2006 to 9.3 billion in 2050. The monitoring body Worldwatch predicts even greater global food shortages, leading to famine on an unprecedented scale. The West’s addiction to meat is at the heart of the problem.

Economies in the developing world are controlled by multinational corporations, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). They are forced to grow what the West wants. The result is that their children starve next to fields of food destined for export as animal feed. At the peak of the Ethiopian famine in 1984, the country was still growing and exporting linseed cake, cottonseed cake and rapeseed meal for European livestock.

As a way of feeding people, meat production is the most extraordinarily inefficient system ever devised. Most of the food eaten by animals is either excreted or used as fuel to keep them alive and kicking. For every 10kg of soya protein fed to America’s cattle, only one kg is converted into meat. Two billion people could be fed on the vegetable protein consumed and largely wasted by them. And the situation is accelerating out of control as developing countries such as China mimic the ‘West is best’ philosophy of meat eating. They have turned from being food exporters to food importers in order to sustain their blossoming factory farms.

If land was used to grow crops directly for consumption by humans, every single person on the planet could be fed. Land the size of five football pitches can grow enough meat to feed two people, maize to feed 10, grain to feed 24 or soya to feed 61. The West’s meat-based diet uses four-and-a-half times more land than is necessary for a vegan diet and two-and-a-quarter more than for a vegetarian diet.

There’s a rich irony to all this. Millions of affluent Westerners are dying from heart attacks, strokes, diabetes and some cancers, largely caused by eating animal products, while the world’s poor are dying from diseases of poverty. The number of overweight people now equals the number of underweight - estimated at 1.1 billion of each.

The developing world has not always been hungry. The problem started during the industrial revolution when European countries needed raw materials, which they took through invasion and colonisation, claiming the land as their own. Indigenous people were forced to grow crops such as cotton to sell to their new masters at a knock-down price.

Colonisation has ended but control remains in the hands of the West and its demand is still for cheap cash crops such as animal feed. Any attempt to add value to goods by processing them is met with punitive import duties. These rock bottom prices ensure that crippling national debts can never be repaid - loans frequently made to long-disappeared corrupt dictators for military expenditure. They often have damaging conditions attached, such as when Costa Rica borrowed money from the World Bank. It was required to clear rainforest for cattle grazing to supply the West with beef. Fifty-two of the world’s poorest countries owe the West £213 billion! The money they pay in interest far exceeds any ‘development aid’ they might receive back.

It’s easy to blame droughts and other natural disasters as the cause of famine. In fact, most are man made and are directly linked to the demands of meat production on world food supplies. Despite Europe using most of its land for animals, it’s not enough and high-protein animal feed is imported from the third world - enough to cover an area of land the size of Britain, France, Italy and New Zealand.

Eating meat isn’t the only reason for world hunger but it is a major one. Vegetarianism is part of the remedy and you don’t even have to wear a red nose!

The future’s bright, the future’s green! It has to be!

Want to find out more? Feed the World, our fully referenced guide, details who in the world is hungry, why countries are in debt, why factory farming is a disaster for the developing world and going vegetarian is a vital solution.  Read it free online at www.viva.org.uk, or in hard-copy for £1 (plus 50p p&p) each.