THE world's 80 richest people earn as much as the 3.5 billion who make up the lower-earning half of the Earth's population.

It is hard to get one's head around that level of inequality, or the fact that while august banking institutions are helping obscenely wealthy individuals to avoid paying tax, one in nine people in the world can't get enough to eat.

The level of food poverty in Scotland is on a different scale to that experienced in parts of the developing world, but the fact that a significant number of families now rely on foodbanks remains a shocking indictment on our society. Nor must we allow ourselves to become inured to the fact that foodbanks exist in 21st-century Scotland. For as the country's top public health officials point out, while emergency services like this provide a vital emergency lifeline, they can't be allowed to become "an accepted part of life".

As we report today, Linda de Caestecker, director of public health in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, believes forcing people to depend on such services poses a risk to their mental, as well as physical, health. "It is dispiriting, it makes you lack hope and wonder if things will ever change," she says. "If you can't feed your children, how do you feel as a parent?"

Desperate, seems the most appropriate answer - especially given de Caestecker's warning that, unless the situation is tackled, those children "will grow up in poorer health than their parents".

The "diseases of poverty" listed by de Caestecker make grim reading: heart disease, diabetes, addictions, suicide. So does her reminder that the 13.5-year gap in life expectancy between men living in Scotland's most poorest and most affluent areas has remained stubbornly persistent for 15 years, and that while women fare slightly better, the equivalent gap in female life expectancy has actually grown wider.

So what's to be done? De Caestecker and her Lothian counterpart, Prof Alison McCallum, are calling for a raft of measures, including community supermarkets , improved childcare and support for lone parents to work, as well as a national healthy food policy.

They also demand action on benefits and a living wage for everyone: a timely call, following the Office for National Statistics' report that 700,000 Britons now rely on a zero-hours contract for their main job.

With just over two months to go until the General Election, politicians had better listen carefully to the public health officials' prescriptions. Because no party that fails to place the eradication of food poverty at the heart of their manifesto is fit to govern this country - and Scotland's voters know it.