MALTA PAYS THE IDLE TO GET FATTER
By Economist
Malta is among the fattest countries in Europe. Official figures are blunt. In 2022 more than one in four adults were obese. Men were worse off than women. World Health Organization country data for 2024 place Malta’s adult obesity rate at about 33 per cent. That is not a rounding error. It is a public-health emergency.
The young are already marked. About 32 per cent of 15-year-olds are overweight or obese. The EU average is 21 per cent. Only 12 per cent of those teenagers take moderate exercise every day. In 2019 more than seven in ten adults reported no health-enhancing aerobic activity at all. Diabetes in adults aged 20 to 79 is now estimated at about 10 per cent. The pattern is not mysterious. Too many calories. Too little movement.
America’s food-stamp record is the warning Malta ignores. Free food given to people who do little paid work is stored as fat. Insulin rises. Appetite grows. Obesity, diabetes and heart disease follow. The public pays twice: first for the food, then for the hospital and the drugs.
Cuba after the Soviet collapse proved the opposite. Trade with Russia collapsed. Fuel vanished. Daily calories fell from nearly 2,900 to under 2,000. People walked and cycled because they had no choice. Physical activity doubled. Obesity was cut in half. Deaths from diabetes fell by half. Heart disease and stroke fell too. When food and cars returned, the diseases returned.
Malta is not Cuba in the 1990s. It is an island with ready access to EU funds and government bonds. Budget 2026 did not make the idle move more or eat less. It paid them more. By March 2026 most of the new measures were already being paid. One mid-year round sent nearly €27 million to 62,400 families.
The food parcels remain. The government’s Scheme for Food Distribution still sends pasta, rice and tins to people on social assistance and related benefits. There is no 2026 rule that an able-bodied adult must work or lose the box.
Work is eased, not demanded. Savings limits were loosened, not tightened. The retirement age will not rise.
The body has not changed. People store more when they move less. Extra cash and free food, without a duty to work, feed Malta’s record waistline. Cuba showed that eating less and moving more cut deaths faster than today’s weight-loss drugs. Malta chose higher payments and the same parcels. The sick-list will keep growing.