HEALTH: Non-Aligned Movement Defends Role of State

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Jun 25 1998 (IPS) - The need for the state to oversee and guide reforms of health systems in the next century was the focus of the first session of the 23rd meeting of health ministers of the Non- Aligned Movement (NAM) in Cuba Thursday.

Ensuring economic sustainability, guaranteeing universal health coverage and making prevention the spinal cord of health systems were the challenges outlined by the director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Hiroshi Nakajima.

Just as at the time the Non-Aligned Movement emerged, its role continues to lie in “maximising the potential” of member countries and coming up with policies providing for the better use of resources, Nakajima said during the opening ceremony of the meeting.

As current president of NAM, Colombian President Ernesto Samper called this week’s two-day meeting to work towards a common stance on health policies with a view to the coming century.

The representatives of more than 60 of the 113 NAM members, including 30 health ministers, are meeting in Havana in the first such meeting to be held outside the annual WHO assembly.

“Although the private sector is very important, the basic responsibility for health must lie with the public sector,” said Samper, on an official visit to Cuba Wednesday through Saturday.

The NAM commitment “must ensure the passage from our old, welfare-oriented and inbred public health models towards more modern, efficient and transparent models of social security,” said Samper, who added that he was pleased that the meeting was held in Cuba, whose public health system “has achieved a life expectancy similar to that of developed countries.”

“When this speech is over and the hour is up, 625 children will have died of respiratory infections worldwide, 353 of diarrhea, and 114 of measles,” said Samper, on the stand next to Cuban President Fidel Castro.

“All the healthy children born next to these sick children will have, at birth, 13 years less life expectancy than children born in industrialised countries,” because “those countries spend 89 percent of what the world invests in health to attend 19 percent of the world’s population,” he added.

“Long before economic globalisation, the social problems of developing countries were already globalised.

“It is true that the end of the cold war put an end to our ideological differences, which were the raison d’etre of our struggle as non-aligned nations. But it did not put an end to the realities that separated and continue to separate us from industrialised countries,” Samper stressed.

The North-South division in the field of health was made patent May 16 by a NAM resolution presented at the World Health Assembly, where 51 countries voted in favour of it, 36 against and four abstained.

That resolution says the globalisation of the economy leads to the adoption of market mechanisms in health systems, which in certain circumstances affects provision of health services and interferes in the capacity of developing nations to take appropriate routes of action.

Samper went even further Thursday, saying the commitment assumed by NAM nations in the wake of the Havana meeting would translate into collective action to convince the world of the dangers of unbridled globalisation.

“A globalisation process that fails to take into account the social costs generated by the savage logic of the market can become a serious threat to global coexistence itself,” he maintained.

He supported the proposal by African nations that standards and guidelines for regulating purchases and sales of medicine and services should be included on the movement’s health agenda.

Without refuting the right of transnationals to sell technology through medicine, we should demand “the right of developing countries to have access to those technological possibilities” which are paid “with high costs to the health of our children,” Samper added.

In a world increasingly divided between “those who know and those who don’t,” developing countries must not be limited to “a kind of technological apartheid, segregated from the knowledge that generates development,” Samper concluded.