During 2018, almost 47% of the total households in the country had food problems. The proportion reached its highest level in 2020, the year of the Covid Pandemia, with 52%. In 2024 it was reduced to 33%, according to the results of the National Household Revenue and Expenses (ENIGH) 2024.
Although it is a considerable decrease, there are still thousands of homes that touch food insecurity or that fell into it, not having access to sufficient, safe and nutritious foods.
Last year, for example, 3.1 million households ran out of food at least once and another 11.3 million worried that the same thing happened to them.
Living with these limitations or hungry has impacts on physical health and contributes to malnutrition. It also impacts mental health. A meta -analysis spread in the magazine Public Health Nutritionassociated with the University of Cambridge, found that people in food insecurity have a higher risk of anemia, diabetes, hypertension or cancer, and manifest anguish, anxiety and depression.
Thousands of children without eating enough
In about 7.6 million problems were experienced to meet the food needs of girls, boys and adolescents. Even in almost 1.9 million homes, the amount of food served to those under 18 years of age had to be reduced.
In addition, the childhoods of 828,000 homes experienced hunger but did not eat and in another 588,000 houses they made a single meal a day or, flat, they did not try food in 24 hours.
This last figure is 36% lower than that registered in 2018, when 919,000 minors were left without eating in a whole day. However, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warns that the reduction of children’s food poverty advances slowly globally, although it contributes to child malnutrition.
“Child food poverty harms all children, but it is especially harmful in early childhood, when insufficient intake of essential nutrients through diet can cause the most serious damage to child survival, physical growth and cognitive development, which catches children already their families in a cycle of poverty and deprivations,” he explains in his report Child food poverty: nutritional deprivation in early childhood.
