HEALTH: Non-Aligned Movement Puts Health High on Int’l Agenda

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, May 6 1998 (IPS) - The Non Aligned Movement (NAM) will meet with the new Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Gro Harlem Brundtland, to express its concern over the deteriorating state of people’s health and their diminishing access to health care in the developing world.

A statement released by NAM health ministers announced the movement’s decision to put health high on the global political agenda.

The communique stresses that strong measures are needed to counteract the “iniquitous” effects of globalisation on health and health care.

A majority of the health ministers from the 113 NAM member countries will met with Brundtland next Wednesday, a few hours after the expected confirmation of the former Norwegian prime minister’s designation as director-general.

The World Health Assembly, which meets May 11 to 16 in Geneva, will dedicate next Wednesday’s morning session to ratifying the Executive Board’s decision to name Brundtland as successor to Japan’s Hiroshi Nakajima.

The communique adds that the meeting may also be attended by NAM heads of state or government, among them Cuban President Fidel Castro. The outgoing director-general invited Castro to attend the Assembly’s May 14 plenary session which will celebrate the 50th anniversary of WHO.

Delegates from Cuba, Colombia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Malaysia, Peru, Senegal and South Africa met in Geneva this week to assess NAM’s health policy.

The WHO division in charge of cooperation with high-need countries and people took part in the meeting, which was convoked by Colombian Health Minister Maria Teresa de Saade. (Colombia is currently presiding over NAM).

The participants in the meeting also criticised the “undue pressure” from external agencies to accept stringent conditions in exchange for aid.

“The conventional health system reform prescribed by the international comunity, with its downsizing and sharply reduced budgets, has not delivered the promise goods. Quite the contrary,” says the communique.

The backdrop to the Brundtland-NAM meeting is the conviction of the Colombian Ministry of Health, shared by most of the NAM ministers of health, that “health systems today are inadequate for achieving equity in health and sustainability, precisely because health sector reform has been driven by the developed North, and especially by international financial institutions, rather than by the needs and priorities of the South’s ministries of health.”

The communique adds that “on the very same day that NAM countries were expressing their concern over spreading poverty in developing countries and urging that health be put at the heart of the global political agenda, Brundtland was saying essentially the same things to the World Bank in Washington.”

“We cannot allow health to remain a secondary item on the international political agenda. We know that the vast majority of human suffering and early deaths in the world are poverty-related. Ill health leads to poverty and poverty breeds ill health. People in developing countries carry 90 percent of the disease burden, yet have access to only 10 percent of the resources used for health,” the health ministers conclude.