The severity of the situation regarding child malnutrition in our country, was already detected by the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe in his recent visit to the Spanish state, where he expressed concern about this situation of poverty and malnutrition. This news does not come to us 'again', because we already knew that child poverty rates in Spain are among the highest in industrialized countries, but knowledge of the situation does not make it less important.
Different civil society organizations, they have asked the UN to take action before the alarming increase in malnutrition in the Spanish State.
The reality of malnutrition among children can be aggravated during the holiday period, as schoolchildren will not have dining rooms in schools, for some the only meal of the dayThe reality of hunger and undernourishment that affects children is especially worrying in the Spanish state. Families punished by unemployment and with serious economic problems are the type of profile that swells the numbers of child malnutrition, which are at alarming levels: one in four children suffer malnutrition in the Spanish state according to data from the Spanish Agency for Food Safety and Nutrition.
The Rural Platform, Global Food Justice, the Observatori DESC and CEAPA, have shown their Concern about the difficulty of being able to guarantee the feeding of children that until now they only had their food insured at school.
It has been denounced that the state government has not implemented a single measure or a comprehensive public policy in favor of the right to food. Public resources they are being channeled through organizations that do important care work but that is insufficientTherefore, it is urgent that the problem be approached from a rights-based approach that go beyond the welfare and charitable vision: a public policy regarding the right to food.
The reality of malnutrition in childhood, far from being solved, has accentuated with state measures such as the reduction of aid for school canteens, among others that have undermined the protection necessary to preserve the most basic human rights, including food
Oliver de Schutter (United Nations Rapporteur on the Right to Food) has been given a urgent appeal asking you to visit the Spanish state to verify the situation of violation of the Right to Food and demand that the Spanish State comply with the International Covenant on Social and Cultural Economic Rights of the United Nations of which it is a signatory.
The document was delivered to de Schutter during the Vienna + 20 Conference on Human Rights, when he talked about the role of civil society in strengthening the responsibilities of state actors on the right to adequate food.
