YOU tend to get some unusual requests as an MP but the one I received from local fairtrade campaigners to have my breakfast sitting in a shop window has, so far, topped the lot.

So while everyone else was maybe enjoying a long lie in last Saturday, I was sitting in a window of the local fairtrade shop, Rainbow Turtle, with my casework manager Liz – who agreed to keep me company – having breakfast. Yes, it was as bizarre as it sounds.

The idea behind this was taken from a quote from Martin Luther King, who said: ‘before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half the world’. Despite our dependence on farmers and workers for the foods, drinks and products that we love, about 795 million people are undernourished globally.

Fairtrade Fortnight is an annual event coordinated by the Fairtrade Foundation where local campaigners engage with schools, politicians and fairtrade producers to come together and raise awareness of fairtrade. Fairtrade Fortnight has been a regular campaign since 1997 and this year's comes to an end tomorrow. Each year has a different theme, and this year focused on the farmers who work hard to produce the food we eat but who may not know where the next meal is coming from for themselves and their families.

For many people in developed countries, we tend to take food security as a given. If you need more food, it’s available at your local supermarket or store. However, that isn’t the case for many farmers in the developing countries we rely on to provide us with our food security.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that about 795 million people around the world are hungry. Hunger, used as a synonym for undernutrition, happens when someone doesn’t get enough to eat to stay healthy.

Food security means not just tackling the issue of people going hungry but also the underlying causes, including ensuring good-quality food is readily available. Farmers and farm workers need to be able to buy or grow good quality food all year round. Achieving food security has four main components: l Availability – there is a reliable and consistent source of quality food. l Access – people have sufficient resources to produce and/or purchase food. l Utilisation – people have the knowledge and basic sanitary conditions to choose, prepare, and distribute food in a way that results in good nutrition. l Stability – people’s ability to access and utilise food that remains stable and sustained over time.

The statistics of global hunger are truly frightening. Poor nutrition is responsible for almost half of deaths of children under five – that’s about 3.1 million deaths every year. Undernutrition can also have a long-lasting impact on people’s physical and mental health. It is estimated that nearly half of the world’s hungry people live on small farms producing around 80 per cent of the world’s food by value. Out of these 500 million small farms, it is estimated that 400 million smallholder farmers are undernourished. For instance, there are 125 million coffee growers and workers in developing nations living on less than $2 (£1.40) a day.

Fairtrade aims to tackle food security by giving better prices to farmers and workers, meaning they have more money to buy food and to invest in their land to increase productivity. Recent academic studies from both Harvard University and the University of Gottingen in Germany find that “fairtrade does achieve many of its intended goals” and that under fairtrade, coffee farmers’ likelihood of being poor decreased by half and household living standards increased by 30 per cent.

Fairtrade is making a difference to local communities across the developing world and I’m proud that Renfrewshire has a great track record in supporting it. As well as the county achieving fairtrade status, there are lots of local fairtrade groups who have been supporting this cause for many years. My breakfast in the shop window was part of a wider event promoting fairtrade and I was happy to visit stalls in Paisley Town Hall supporting this movement. While there I also managed to pick up some fairtrade Easter eggs, as my local branch was holding one of its regular donation sessions for our local foodbank and was specifically looking for these treats. This resulted in the branch collecting more than 50 eggs for our local foodbank.

Unfortunately, when it comes to food security the Tory austerity agenda has meant this is an issue that is not just confined to developing nations.

It’s an issue in my constituency; it’s an issue across the whole of Scotland. More and more people are relying on foodbanks to feed themselves and their families. The introduction of Universal Credit is resulting in some people having to wait weeks for their first payment and having to survive on handouts from local foodbanks.

After my stint eating in the shop window I went along to the Trussell Trust’s annual conference in Glasgow, where I not only heard of the work that they do for communities the length and breadth of Scotland but also thanked them for their work supporting some of the most vulnerable in our society.

It is, however, a disgrace that in 21st-century Scotland families have to rely on charity to get fed. While the Tories are too busy tearing themselves to shreds with the infighting over Europe, I am so grateful that there are people living in the real world trying to tackle the everyday problems families face.