(HEMA) Initiative. - OAS

PRELIMINARY VERSION BASE DOCUMENT FOR
THE MEETING OF HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT
MINISTERS OF THE AMERICAS
Mar del Plata - June 17, 2005
Human beings, like all organisms, depend on their environment for their survival, health and
wellbeing. Their capacity to adapt to their surrounding environment and moreover, to modify their
natural and social environment to better suit their needs, allowed the species to survive and prosper.
However, while these modifications improved living standards to the extent of increasing life
possibilities, they created, at the same time, health and survival hazards.
The countries of the Americas include a huge range of natural ecosystems and a similar diversity
of cultures, economies and social conditions. Differences between countries are identifiable
and acknowledged, but great disparities are frequently found even between communities within
the same country or city.
A minority of developed countries and a majority of countries at various stages of transition
towards development cohabit in the continent, which is faced with the double task of solving problems
of different degrees involving diseases associated to biological pollution and health hazards
caused by air and water pollution; from solid waste disposal and from the handling of toxic and
hazardous substances.
Although countries differ in their problem-solving capacity, an issue that calls for adequate policies
and plans for situations at national and local level, there exist important common denominators
that offer a basis for cooperation between countries.
None of the nations is free of populations immersed in poverty; exposed to weather, physical,
biological and chemical hazards; deficiently organized for self-assistance and community cooperation;
and with difficulties to ensure universal social, educational and health services.
Furthermore, no country is isolated from the impact of its neighbors’ environmental and life conditions
and all of them are exposed to the side effects that unsustainable development has on the
atmosphere, water, soil and natural biological diversity.
ENVIRONMENTAL, HEALTH AND ECONOMIC BASES FOR THE INITIATIVE
OF THE HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT MINISTERS
The efforts to establish guidelines that take into account environmental safety and its potential
impact on health, acquired a new dimension in the United Nations Conference on Human
Environment (Stockholm, Sweden, 1972). As of then, a series of Conferences were held at an international
level, which, although seeking to build a broader than sectorial view, somthow privileged
technological aspects that at that time represented restrictions to act. During the 1960 decade,
through the so-called Punta del Este letter, the Americas learned of a proposal to supply water and
sanitation services to certain areas of rural population of the Region, as a way to reduce the high
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