Congress report - European Health Forum Gastein

Forum II: Globalisation, World Trade and Health
Health is not the most prestigious one of ministries compared with finance or defence and
tend to be dominated by the medical model. As this model is based on the challenge of
disease rather than the challenge of health, the task is seen as medical care of the sick,
rather than reducing the disease burden. The impact of globalisation on health and the
increasing globalisation of certain diseases as well as health damaging practices have only
recently been gaining the attention they deserve.
Environmental degradation, BSE and the dioxin crisis have all contributed to the
reinforcement of the focus on health within the EU and to clarifying the need for Europe to
have an unambiguous and evidence based common public health platform.
However, much has to be done until the public health mandate of the European Community
is fully implemented and the enlarging EU takes health responsibilities seriously. If the
accession countries observe the dichotomy that Brussels spends “pocket-money” on anticancer
programmes on one hand and more than a billion euros subsidising tobacco farmers
on the other, they will not be prepared to meet public health policy obligations. Such an
experience suggest that in spite of rhetorics EU marginalize health problems during the
enlargement.
I would like to see and work for a vigilant and demanding health policy position from the
European Union, serving the creation of a global health arena in which old and new actors,
governments and NGOs, businesses and policy networks are jointly coping with transnational
influences on health. A number of invaluable lessons have been learned on public health.
The most important one is still to be fully understood, that various forces interested in
health gains, can withstand and fight disease effectively and efficiently only if they are
united.
Ron Labonte
The EPHA and IUHPE do not oppose liberalized global trade and investment per se, nor
changes in tariff structures and other national regulations that impede such trade and
investment, provided the effects of trade/investment liberalization are ecologically sound,
lead to a fairer distribution of goods (including income) within and between nations and
generally improve the goals of human development as articulated in numerous UN and
multilateral declarations and accords. Liberalization proponents claim that open markets are
both necessary and sufficient to accomplish these ends. Twenty years of experience with
Structural Adjustment Programs and other forms of market liberalization do not empirically
support this claim. Strong, internally developed and saturated economies benefit by
liberalization; poorer domestic economies rarely do. Given the growth of income inequalities
between rich and poor nations, and the ecological impossibility of fossil-fuel based
development of poor nations to the existing level of rich ones (which would require, by one
estimate, an additional four planets to exploit), human development on a planetary scale
demands a global re-distribution of wealth from rich to poor. This is an inescapable fact, and
one that cannot be resolved by trade or investment liberalization and, indeed, is exacerbated
by it under present liberalization rules. If the WTO is to uphold its promise of creating a
"rules-based trading system" that will help weaker participants offset the economic power of
stronger participants, its basic premises of the relationship between trade liberalization and
human development must be reversed. Its Agreements need to be subordinated to human
development and environmental sustainability goals, and not allowed to overbear them.
International Forum Gastein, Tauernplatz 1, A-5630 Bad Hofgastein
Tel.: +43 (6432) 7110-70, Fax: Ext. 71, e-mail: info@ehfg.org, website: www.ehfg.org
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