With the Rio+20 conference ending in Brazil, it appears that
much of the recommendations outlined 20 years ago in the 1992 conference still
remain unattained. Known as the Agenda 21 (a global development agenda for the
21st century anchored in sustainable development), the historic
document of the first Rio meeting described
the connection among various development sectors and the need for them to work
together if sustainable development was to be achieved. The call for action in
the form or the Rio Declaration also captured the endorsement of so many Heads
of State in this commitment. These outputs pointed to the fact that our world
is really one entity; that anything we do to our ecosystem affects everything
else – visibly or invisibly. The proverbial “flutter of a butterfly in Rio
affecting the weather in China ”
is to be believed. The commitments then were that we would all work together
for the protection of the environment (our common denominator) on which we all
depend for our survival.
But in the twenty years hence, our present predicament has
proved ourselves forgetful, with selfish gain being the winner. Instead of
coming together, we have partitioned the world as never before and driven the
divide between the haves and the have-nots even wider. With globalization and
the IT technology that have sprouted during the interim, we have drifted ever
farther apart even as the social media has made the chatter among ourselves
longer and louder. The meeting in Rio that just
ended, seemed for many, too influenced by the business sector and politicians
on the one side and civil society on the other. As a public health professional, my work for
the past several years has been to help bridge this awareness gap on the
connection of human health and the environment. Taking Chapter 6 of the Agenda
21 as the basis, my effort has been to show how human health is linked to our
development action in the other sectors.
A simple example may suffice. Let’s take the case of
agriculture and transport. One would perhaps ask, “what do these have to do
with health? Neither builds hospitals nor produces doctors?” This kind of parochial response was precisely what one would have got even then twenty years ago. Even
20 years later, we are still grappling with these basic questions. A new
generation of policy makers and practitioners need to be re-oriented or re-educated.
We need to realize that these sectors are man-made entities; not divine
dictates. What god gave us are our lives not the tribes that we live in - that
was our choice or making. It is our management gurus that have divided our
world, and isolated our working environment -- separated ourselves for our
political motives (or sometimes in the name of managerial efficiency) and
ensconced in the comfort of that awareness or ignorance as the case may be,
have taken this to be the reality of the universe. Yes, ignorance is bliss
indeed; until reality strikes us, as when thronged and chaotic roads maim us,
or contaminated vegetables poison or kill us.
The fumes from our motor vehicles and our factories are what
give us the air pollution we have to breathe.
And it’s the resulting effects that we feel in our chest, our eyes, and
fill our hospital emergency rooms. Similarly how many of us are aware of the
chemicals used in agriculture and their grave danger to human health? The lure
of big business distracts us from using the safer manure we can make ourselves
from the waste nature leaves with us. Consequently, many agriculture workers
are poisoned in their workplace, and we too as the recipients of the final
product are exposed in varying degrees to the pesticide residues on our nice
looking fruits and vegetables. This is the link of health with the other
players in our development process. In these two cases, getting healthy means
others having to play their part in reducing the use of pesticides, or growing
more nutritious crops nationally, or regularly buckling-up when driving our
cars, using unleaded gasoline, reducing the numbers of motor vehicles, or our traffic
police doing a better beat. With such awareness comes the realization for undertaking
collective action.
So we can now see that our health care costs are in fact the
responsibilities of our development sectors as a collectivity. Our energy,
environment, trade, education, social, sectors are all partners in this
endeavor. Conferences such as that at Rio then
and now and the many global UN sponsored conferences of the decades since then
have had the same refrain of needing people of the world to be working
together. However, the challenge really is at the national levels – to get
political decision makers, the big business and civil society to work together.
Unfortunately, it is in these details that we find the devil that stymies us.
With collective thinking we can overcome.
For Maldives ,
and our health sector, this realization needs to be instilled in our atoll
leaders – the counselors – who must now take the reigns of leading health
development in our decentralized system. The ministry of health cannot wait for
making this happen. It is imperative that training and awareness be brought to
bear on them so that we can maintain the gains the health sector has reaped
over these past 5 decades or so.
2 comments:
So many conferences like Rio. Lots of inputs but hardly very little impact. One good example is UN MDG's . Year 2015 is at our door step and where are we now today? Decentralization of health services is only a name. Only recently, MOH announce they will have all health workers under CCHDC. I think we have a centralized health system! We are facing the “Triple Threat” like malnutrition, food insecurity and weakened institutional capacity. Each of these problems alone poses a major obstacle to implement a good heath system- saeed
The big international conferences (albeit the expenses) is a way to keep global issues in the limelight. Otherwise these tend to die in people's and nations' minds. You are right to say we need more real action at the national level on the real health issues we face. And with issues becoming seemingly more interconnected, the challenge to get more stakeholders together is another competing consideration of program management in particular and of health governance in general.
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