CUENCA, Ecuador, Jul 21 (IPS) - Alternative reports on global health, presented at the second People's Health Assembly in Ecuador this week, question the free-market, neoliberal economic model and view it as the cause of many of the health problems facing humanity today. These include the indiscriminate use of toxic products in agriculture, pollution caused by the oil industry, the consumption of transgenic crops, the destruction of the urban environment by pollution, and the commercialisation of health services. The reports by the Global Health Watch and the Observatorio Latinoamericano de Salud see a healthy life as a fundamental human right, the enjoyment of which depends on economic, political and social factors. The Global Health Watch is a broad collaboration of public health experts, non-governmental organisations, civil society activists, community groups, health workers and academics. Mexican academic Laura Juárez Sánchez, who took part in drawing up the reports, said that by generating increasing unemployment, poverty and rural migration, the ”capitalist economic model” is the main cause of the return of illnesses that had been basically eradicated and of deaths from easily curable ailments. Juárez Sánchez pointed to the reappearance of cholera and deaths of people from scabies, typhoid fever, diarrhoea, tonsillitis and pneumonia. These illnesses are expanding as a result of ”malnutrition and the lack of access to and deterioration of basic social services like health care, education and housing,” said Juárez Sánchez, a researcher at the Universidad Obrera, a Mexican university. ”Rural and urban families are forced to live in overcrowded conditions without piped water or plumbing, to share collective bathrooms, and to live under roofs of corrugated iron or cardboard,” she said. Alex Zapata, who wrote the chapter of the Global Health Watch report - also known as the Alternative World Health Report - that deals with the ”mercantilisation” of water, said ”capitalist globalisation” has led to the privatisation of sewage and water services. That means water is becoming a marketable commodity or merchandise to which only those who can afford it have access, which will have a negative impact on the public health of a large part of the global population, he said. The reports were presented Wednesday at the Jul. 17-23 second People's Health Assembly in the city of Cuenca in southern Ecuador. Biologist Elizabeth Bravo of Ecuador, who provided information on the effects of transgenic food crops, said the introduction of genetically modified seeds is giving certain transnational corporations control over food production worldwide, ”as is already occurring in the case of soy beans.” ”The global market for transgenic soy is the monopoly of a single company, the U.S.-based Monsanto, which sells seeds that are resistant to its Roundup herbicide,” she said. ”The (Roundup Ready) seeds are not more productive,” said Bravo. ”The only thing they do is make farmers dependent on a weed control model based on intensive use of an herbicide.” According to the biologist, the expansion of transgenic crops, besides creating dependency, promotes monoculture farming with the subsequent decline of essential food crops and the loss of diversity and food sovereignty. Bravo also said the effects of transgenic crops are extremely negative for the poor rural population, which in turn has repercussions on public health. ”The expansion of soy in Argentina has displaced other crops like rice, corn, sunflowers and wheat, and has pushed other farming activities into marginal areas. Since 1988, the number of farms has shrunk by 24.5 percent, with the disappearance of 103,400 family farms. ”Thousands and thousands of families migrate from the countryside to urban slums every year,” said the biologist. Bravo admitted that more research is needed into the health effects on humans of transgenic foods, but stressed that studies have found negative consequences for animals living near fields where genetically modified crops are grown.

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=29594

Due to globalisation more and more people are moving from the countryside to the urban cities in search for more jobs, this therefore resulted in overcrowding and the declining of public health, for example clean water would only be avaliable for those who could afford it.

Globalisation also promotes monoculture farming and increased usage of pesticides which damages the environment.
Increasing intensification and monocultural approaches to farming have resulted in amalgamation of holdings and an increase in field size. In the traditional arable areas many pasture fields are being converted to arable cropping, but in the traditional livestock areas the reverse is happening with a move away from arable enterprises and mixed farming, which is proving damaging to the flora and fauna. In places new enterprises, such as outdoor pig rearing or free range poultry, have introduced non-pastoral forms of land management and posed planning problems, e.g. where larger buildings are needed to house extensive poultry enterprises.

http://www.defra.gov.uk/erdp/docs/swchapter/section12/summary.htm

~Liewxun