The Cuenca Declaration

THE CUENCA DECLARATION  (Espanol)

Coming from 82 countries around the world, 1492 people met at the Second People’s Health Assembly in Cuenca, Ecuador from 17th to 22nd July 2005, to analyse global health problems and to develop strategies to promote Health for all.

Overwhelmingly we reaffirmed the continuing importance of the People’s Charter for Health (2000) and saw it as a rallying document for the ongoing struggles of the People’s Health Movement globally and within countries.

The vision endorsed at PHA2 is for a socially and economically just world in which peace prevails; a world in which all people, whatever their social and economic condition, gender, cultural identity and ability, are respected, are able to claim their right to health and celebrate life, nature, and diversity.

Solidarity with struggles in Ecuador

Here in the heart of the Andes we have learned much from the hospitality, living cultural heritage, and current struggles of our Ecuadoran sisters and brothers.

• We join them in solidarity to oppose the signing of the Free Trade Agreement imposed by the government of the United States and the international financial institutions. This agreement will increase corporate profits, impoverish the workers, campesinos and indigenous peoples of the Andes, negatively influence their living and working conditions and impede their access to health care and enjoyment of health.
• We also join our Andean partners in opposing Plan Colombia, the name for the biological warfare carried out against them by the United States, which is poisoning their land and water, and militarizing their border regions.

The global health reality

We deplore the worsening conditions of health experienced by many of the world’s people and we denounce their cause – neo-liberalism. Neo-liberal polices imposed by the G8, transfer wealth from the South to the North, from the poor to the rich, and from the public to the private sector. Corporate profits increase while poor people, indigenous peoples and the victims of war and occupation, suffer.

Economically and politically generated health inequalities have increased, yet these root causes of avoidable disease and death are not effectively addressed by current policies or programs.

 The spirit of Alma Ata has been betrayed by most official health systems, though it has been kept alive in the face of adversity by health activists and health workers in community projects all over the world. Comprehensive primary health care is implemented in very few places, and the provision of health services is rarely seen as a collective social responsibility. Under neo-liberalism there is no right to health, racism is nurtured, women’s oppression deepens, social exclusion increases, environmental degradation becomes the norm, workers' rights are non-existent, and war serves the profit seeking of big corporations. Governments, IFIs, WHO, multilateral and bilateral agencies are strongly influenced by the agendas of these corporations.

Establish the Right to health in an era of hegemonic globalization

PHM calls on the peoples of the world to mobilize against the denial of the Right to Health. The global economic framework of neo-liberalism, privatization and “free trade,” made operational through the WTO and international financial institutions, has played a determinant role in the transfer to the corporate sector of the control of the determinants of health. This leads to environmental destruction, toxic pollution, denial of rights to water, food, and life itself. The human right to health and health care must take precedence over the profits of corporations, especially the profiteering of pharmaceutical companies. The WTO operates as a de facto world government even though it is unelected, unrepresentative and unaccountable. Responsibility for international trade and development must be returned to the people through reappropriation of relevant UN bodies such as UNCTAD. Unless it is massively reformed to operate democratically, the WTO must be dismantled as it is a major source of massive human rights violations and injustice and a key mechanism of corporate control of life on earth.   

The right to health will be achieved through large scale popular mobilization.

• PHM will initiate or support struggles related to the right to water, food security and food sovereignty, a healthy environment, dignified work, safe housing, universal education and gender equity, since people’s health depends on the fulfillment of these basic rights.
• PHM will launch a comprehensive campaign to achieve the “Global Right to Health and Health Care” at the local, national and international levels, to defend health and social security (including health care) systems, and to document and oppose health inequities and denial of the right to health. 
• PHM will defend health workers in their opposition to the privatization of health services by building broad multi-sectoral alliances.
• PHM will campaign to end TRIPS, remove it from the WTO, and oppose bilateral Free Trade Agreements and TRIPS+.
• We call upon governments to use the Doha agreement to provide people with affordable generic drugs.
• We oppose public-private partnerships because the private sector has no place in public health policy making.
• PHM will continue to monitor and provide inputs for the WHO Commission on the Social Determinants of Health to ensure that it effectively addresses the political and socio-economic causes of poverty, ill health and health inequity and engages in meaningful dialogue with civil society as much as possible. 
• PHM will work with allied movements to coordinate common international actions against privatization and inequitable trade regimes.

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