(April 16, 2023) “Let’s clarify, we did not cause the current climate disaster, but we are facing the health effects — even if we may not have started this catastrophe, we must be the ones to resolve it. We’ll demand answers from the producers of fossil fuels.” That’s how the 17-year-old British Indian Dev Sharma addressed the House of Commons, calling for swift action on climate change to prevent its adverse impacts on health.
Being one of the 250 members of the Youth Parliament from across the UK who were invited to debate on topics related to health in the chamber, Dev took the opportunity to raise his voice against food poverty. “We look at you and ask why we don’t have clean air to breathe, why huge parts of the world have drowned (and) why you don’t act,” asked Dev. The young activist has been a powerful voice for youth on issues like holiday hunger and free school meals. At age 15, the young MP for Leicestershire won the Diana Award for food activism.
Dev Sharma is young MP from Leicestershire
An active voice in the world of food poverty, he has been a vocal campaigner on the influence of junk food advertising on young people, especially on social media. “I feel like I’m being bombarded with junk food ads on my phone and computer, and it’s overwhelming. They are everywhere, popping up when we’re watching videos, when I’m gaming with friends, and we don’t have an escape, especially not at the moment when we are living on our screens. It’s an overwhelming rising tide of advertising, I and every other young person need support. The health of one in three children is already at risk from the food they eat,” he wrote on The Food Foundation website.
That’s when he began the campaign to ban junk food advertising online, starting an online open letter campaign to Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock so that young people in his community could choose the food they wanted without the nonstop corporate pressure. After a few years of campaigning which he found the support of celebrities like Jamie Oliver, he was successful in getting the government to ban junk food advertising online in June 2021. Dev, who is from the Rushey Mead area of Leicester, currently works as the chair of Bite Back 2030, a youth-led movement, working towards fighting for children’s health and revolutionising the food industry.
Dev Sharma won the UK Parliament Award
It was while studying for his GCSE exams in 2021 that Dev recognised that he was being bombarded with fast food advertisements on YouTube, promoting unhealthy eating habits. This inspired him to liaise with his team at Bite Back to launch a national campaign to put an end to the adverts. “After research found that 15 billion ads were being seen by children and young people, there was a consultation launched by the Government to ban junk food. The Government asked for the public’s opinion on the matter. But I felt like the voices of young people weren’t really being heard. So, I wanted to do something about it,” he said in an interview.
He wrote to the then health secretary Matt Hancock requesting a ban on such advertising. “Each time a member of the public signed the letter, an automatic email would be sent directly to the Health Secretary. Because we got so many signatures, Mr. Hancock’s emails were flooded with emails supporting our cause,” he said, adding, “This led to the Government agreeing to meet with us and our campaign reached the House of Commons. The government agreed that these adverts were harmful. And so, they agreed to ban junk food adverts.”
Even during the pandemic, he put his campaigning skills to use when the UK was under lockdown and the schools were closed and children went without their free school meals. Understanding the gravity of the situation, he shared his views with the media, met with Government Ministers, and even supported footballer and campaigner Marcus Rashford in his advocacy campaign to end child food poverty. Thanks to these efforts, more than one million people signed the petition to support the cause, and it led to some important policy changes – the UK government extended free school meals over the holidays.
Recently, he spoke at the UN Food Systems Summit, and Global Obesity Summit in New York and switched on Leicester’s Diwali Lights, the largest celebration of Diwali outside India.
