Let's start with a few unpalatable truths: nearly a billion people in the world are starving and two billion are malnourished, while 1.4 billion are overweight or obese.

There really is enough food for everyone and yet a child dies from hunger every 15 seconds. (In fact, recent figures from The Lancet suggest it's nearer one death every 10 seconds.) Either way, this issue is less about how food is grown than how it is distributed. Less about access to food than control of food distribution systems.

Here's a line from David Cameron's speech at last weekend's "hunger summit" in London: "It's all about helping those in developing countries take control of their own destiny." Exactly right, Dave, and you really do deserve credit for resisting pressure from your party's well-padded right-wing for cuts in the UK's international aid budget. Yet I fear that if you believe your chairmanship of the G8 Lough Erne summit next week will mark out 2013 as the beginning of the end of world hunger, you will be disappointed.

Why? Because many of those who have been tussling with this dilemma for decades think that, far from eradicating hunger, the hunger summit and the G8 will make it worse. Based on the principle of "the market knows best", the main plank of the summit was the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. Launched last year by the G8, it pledges to increase investment in agriculture through "partnerships" between those to be lifted out of poverty and the alliance's corporate partners, including Monsanto, Dupont and Unilever.

Nine African countries have signed up so far and the UK has pledged £375m of core funding.

But these deals are only true partnerships if they have been concluded with the participation and consent of communities affected. If they have not and if these agreements involve corporate land grabs and the eviction of thousands of peasant farmers (as appears to be happening in pilot projects in Mozambique and Ethiopia), the New Alliance looks more like 21st-century colonialism than the answer to world hunger. Suspicious that the scheme is more about filling corporate coffers than empty stomachs, a number of charities have demanded that the UK Government withhold the aid pledged to the scheme in the next three years. Oxfam describes the focus on big agribusiness as taking us "down the dangerous path of corporate-led agriculture over publicly funded, small-scale farmer-led initiatives that support food security".

A recent UN report found "large scale investment is damaging the food security, incomes, livelihoods and environment for local people". A World Bank report says: "Many investments failed to live up to expectations and instead of generating sustainable benefits, contributed to asset loss and left local people worse off than they would have been without the investment." What's worse these partnership deals dismantle measures designed to protect poor peasant farmers, while biolfuel quotas, EU Common Agricultural Policy and the US subsidies for its cotton farmers remain untouched.

Meanwhile, the G8 has palpably failed to deliver on promises on food security made in Aquila four years ago. Of the impressive $22bn pledged, 26% did not materialise and two-thirds turned out to be double spending (money already committed). Any benefit has been cancelled by the 30% hike in world food prices, largely caused by panicky speculators.

Potentially poor countries have as much to gain from tackling tax dodging as from aid and trade. Zambia reckons it loses $2bn a year that way. Sadly, here too the Lough Erne summit seems destined to disappoint. Apparently, the US and Russia have ganged up to derail Cameron's plans to open up tax havens, making it harder for developing countries to pursue companies exploiting their natural resources without paying tax. I support the Enough Food for Everyone If campaign from Oxfam and 200 other charities but fear that on all their main demands the agenda is slipping away from them because the G8 (once the world's power house) is increasingly impotent in the face of big business. The development agenda must be reclaimed in the name of social justice, not Monsanto.