I was invited to join the trip on the basis of my work with Hesperian Foundation developing the booklet Pesticides are Poison. The Treaty Council had been using the booklet in their communities, and this was an opportunity for me to work with them on the ground, and to use some of the educational activities I had written into the booklet.

Over the last several decades, the Yaqui pueblos – small, dusty villages of low concrete and thatch houses – have become surrounded by vast agricultural fields growing cotton and wheat for export. This was the cuna, the womb, of the Green Revolution – when massive technochemical farming became the way to “feed the world”™ (and win hearts and minds to boot) -- and one of the many hidden costs of that effort has been the complete obliteration of a place, and of a people.

After years of living with the effects of chronic pesticide exposure, from aerial spraying and from working in the fields themselves, many Yaquis are becoming sick. More worrisome still, children are being born with all the miserable telltale signs of chemical poisoning, from spinal column defects to weak bones to learning and developmental disabilities.

I will describe one part of what I saw, and did, in Potam pueblo. But for the straight story, as it were, Indian Country Today published an article on the workshops in Potam. And for a better background, in terms of both Green Revolution history and the current toxicological threat to the Yaqui people, Margaret Reeves of Pesticide Action Network, who was at the gathering, wrote a terrifically informative article.

Read the article in Indian Country Today: www.indiancountry.com

Read the article from Pesticide Action Network: www.panna.org

View or download Hesperian Foundation’s booklet Pesticides are Poison: www.hesperian.org

From this point in the story it would seem to be a case of pesticide poisoning we are talking about. But in fact, from a certain vantage point, it all seems to start from the water.

The WWF was widely considered a failure, while the alternative forum was considered, by all of its participants, to be a huge success. I wrote this article about it for Earth Island Journal, also posted on Hesperian Foundation's website:www.hesperian.info

Here are some articles from daily papers back in March about the water forum and the issues involved:

NY Times:
www.nytimes.com

SF Chronicle:
www.sfgate.com

Here are three reports that have been published in thge last several months on the failures of privatization and the potential for decentralized, locally controlled water infrastructure:

Spreading the Water Wealth, from International Rivers Network:
www.irn.org

‘Pipe Dreams: The failure of the private sector to invest in water services in developing countries’, from World Development Movement and Public Services International:

www.wdm.org.uk

www.foodandwaterwatch.org

AND, here, in English is the declaration that came out of the alternative water forum:

By the end of the World Water Forum – World Water Day, March 22 -- many of the Mexican newspapers had published articles recognizing that it was, overall, a top-heavy event where a lot of money was spent and little was achieved. And many participants seemed to agree. Meanwhile, behind closed doors, Ministers of Water, Energy and Environment from 78 countries, and 68 other Ministerial delegations, negotiated the final Ministerial Declaration of the Forum. Rather than achieving “consensus” on the declaration, however, several Ministers -- most notably Abel Mamani, Water Minister of Bolivia – demanded changes or additions to the document. By the closing ceremony of the WWF no agreement had been reached, though a bland and noncommittal document was agreed upon soon after.

The final declaration commits governments to prioritize water and sanitation as aspects of sustainable development; to continue efforts to reach the millennium development goals of cutting in half the number of people without water and sanitation services by 2015; and to commit funds to reducing risks from water-related natural disasters, among other commitments that do little, if anything, to recognize a need for a different approach to the water issue. Recognizing the bland nature of the document, the Ministries of Bolivia and Venezuela lobbied hard to add an addendum – in the Venezuelan Minister’s words, “to add a little salt to a tasteless soup.” Several other governments – Cuba, Uruguay, Brazil, Angola and Argentina have agreed, or nearly agreed, with the contents of the addendum – and at the end of the forum, the sense behind the scenes was that the discussion was more open than closed.

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/

And don't ask me what time of the morning it is here in the humid and noisy wee hours of Mexico City....

This morning I took part in a meeting of the burdgeoning US water movement, with activists from local struggles in New Mexico, New Hampshire, California, Wisconsin and elsewhere, indigenous groups, border activists, and groups working on national policy campaigns, like Corporate Accountability International, Food and Water Watch, Womens' International League for Peace and Freedom, and on and on, together laying plans to bring water rights to the national agenda at the US Social Forum next January (??) and the Border Social Forum in El Paso/Juarez this May, as well as discussing health impact studies, a proposed Coca Cola boycott and other focused strategies to build the movement.

And, after many long sessions of directly democratic process late into the nights and again in the morning yesterday, a document was drafted by the assembled movements at the alternative water forum to declare some basic principles in the global struggle for community-controlled water resource management.....It will soon be translated into numerous languages including English, but the version completed and agreed on today is in Spanish. For those of you who read Spanish, you'll find a lot of interesting points. For those who don't, now's a good time to learn, as Latin America erupts with popular movements and revolutionary fervor....

Luego luego I'll finish up these dispatches with some notes on how the alternative forum worked, the tone and character of the events, and other points of interest....

Endless booths, all competing for attention with lights and sounds and running water and posters and flashy models (both live human models of the made-up high-heeled variety and less sexed-up scale models of watersheds, dams and irrigation systems). On display for your high-tech consumer excitement: Water filtration systems, beachy tourist destinations, pumps and pipes and water storage systems, universities and companies and products and products and products. Here and there, amidst the eye candy and bombardment of sound, a handful of stalls promoted rainwater catchment, ecological sanitation, rope pumps and pedal pumps and other locally controllable, sustainable technologies.

The contrast between the WWF and the alternative forum – held in the Telephone Workers’ Union Hall and other peoples’ venues around the City (of which, more later....) – is the contrast between the developed and underdeveloped worlds, between the restless idealists of civil society organizing themselves to promote environmental and social justice and the monied technocratic utopians organized by consumption and circumscribed by capital`s ever forward flight toward bigger better faster finer ways to f*&# the world’s poor.

At least, that’s the feeling I get just at the moment, sitting among the bleeps and echoes and flashing lights of the convention center.

This morning at the alternative forum, the Minister of Water of Bolivia, Abel Mamani, gave a statement about the World Water Forum: “The Bolivian government will not sign the Declaration that comes out of the Forum,” he said. “We have read the draft document, and it says nothing. It doesn’t take a position. It would be good if it said something – even if this something was something we do not agree with. Even if this document came out in favour of privatization, that would be better, because we would know better what we are talking about. But in a moment of such crisis in the world as we are living today, a document that says nothing is the worst outcome we could expect….”

He went on: “Our role as human beings is to take care of the natural world, and for this reason water cannot be treated as a commodity – because then we are not taking care of the natural world, we are taking care of our pocket books.”

“The World Bank says States have no money to fund public water. But there is money. Where is the money? The money is in weapons, in defence, in war. If a proposal to take 2%, 5%, 7% out of defence spending and put it into public sector water, if such a proposal were taken seriously, the problem of public water could be solved tomorrow.”

And speaking of `defense,’ a rare report by AP posted to the New York Times –- the only notice about the events in Mexico City that has yet appeared in the US commercial press, to my knowledge -- tells us this: “Water is so scarce or polluted in some parts of the world that the poor might actually go to war to get their hands on it.” I`ll buy a Cherry Coke with a bendy straw for the first person who can tell me what the HELL that means.

Among the workers and families marching, hundreds of youths with masks, sticks, and other black-block accoutrements taunted the police and several small scuffles broke out leading to the arrest, and eventual release of 26 youths allegedly armed with Molotov cocktails.

What the press focused on, not without reason, was the ecstatic destruction of a police car, which represented the entire march on many of front pages the next morning.

(I have a number of good photos from the March, including the violent incidents, but due to technical difficulties, posting the photos will have to wait.....)

Some of the more forceful and creative chants of the march are worth sharing here, in approximate translations:
“El pueblo se cansa
de tanto pinch tranza!”
“The people are tired
Of so much fucking corruption”

“Policia, idiota, a ti tambien te explotan!”
“Police, you idiot, they are exploiting you too!”

And a special favorite, when passing restaurants in the street:
“Mesero consciente, envena el presidente!”
“Waiter of conscience, poison the president!”

Earlier in the day, an event of a very different tone: a group of Hopi Indians had run from their homeland in Arizona all the way to Mexico City, and at noon they arrived in front of the National Museum of Anthropology where they were welcomed by a festive group of Nahuas, Aztec dancers and other indigenas and no-indigenas from all parts of Mexico. The Hopis initiated a ceremony celebrating the sacred nature of water, where indigenous people from many regions had brought water from their homelands and mixed it together in a blessing for all the world’s water.

After the ceremony I interviewed Angel Martinez, a member of the Union of National Water Workers – la coordinadora en defensa del caracter publico del agua. Some of what he shared with me:

“The quality of water service in Mexico is terrible, and you can see it in the high indices of water-borne illnesses and even cancer in every state in Mexico. Apart from diarrheal diseases – the main cause of death in children in every state, we are finding high rates of cancer from heavy metals in the water in quantities that you Gringos would find terrifying…The President of the National Water Commision – CONAGUA – earns $130,000 pesos a year, he lives in a giant house in a wealthy neighborhood, and he has the nerve to tell us ‘the people have to pay a higher price for water services if they want higher quality water.’ Well, if we lower his salary and move him to the neighborhoods where most of us live, we could also improve the quality of water.

The struggle over water between 1918 – the Mexican Revolution – and 1988 was very hidden. The PRI [the government party that ruled Mexico for most of the 20th century] has always used water to divide the people and advance its political agenda. For example, the local PRI government would give one part of a municipality a public water utility ‘for PRIISTAS’ and then tell the rest of the people, ‘if you want water, you can have it, just vote for the PRI.’

“With President Fox the situation remains the same – everything is for sale, and if you want to be part of the power structure, it’s simple – just go along with the politics of selling everything…”

The Coordinadora [Water Worers’ Union] has tried to raise awareness of the water issue by organizing workshops and for a. This January we organized the first Assembly in Defense of of Land and Water and Against Privatization. What is it we hope to achieve? We want to make it known that our water is being privatized in a silent, underground way. It is not lie electricity or oil, where the entire system is simply sold off in the light of day to private companies. In the case of water, CONAGUA gives concessions to industries as part of their manner of working – this is seen as absolutely normal. They will concession a local water utility or a water source to the beer industry, the paper industry, the textile industry and others, and these are not short term concessions – these are concessions that last from 20 to 70 years. Also, the tourist industry, the bottled water industry and others always take precedent over public water utilities.

"The World Water Forum is an event that is attempting to privatize water. The organizers of the WWF think they are coming here to tell Mexico how to privatize water. But what is going to happen is that the Mexican government is going to say, no, let us show YOU how it’s done, without people even realizing!”

PRESS RELEASE
MARCH 13th, 2006

International Grassroots Activists Join Forces to Create an
Alternative to the 4th World Water Forum
Hundreds of organizations promote community water events to defend water as a human right

A massive outcry in defense of water for people and the planet is brewing. As
official governmental bodies, influential world players such as the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund, and some of the largest global water and energy
corporations prepare for the Fourth World Water Forum in Mexico City, grassroots
organizations are creating an alternative space to hear the voices of people who have been
shut-out of the “official” Forum.

Between March 14th and March 22nd, thousands of people will join open forums,
seminars, workshops, protests and cultural events to defend the fundamental human right
to clean, affordable water. These events call for water to be recognized as part of the
global commons and call for new visions of community and public management of water.

Rallies in Defense of Water have been organized by and for indigenous and
campesino organizations, community groups, human rights groups, academics, trade
unions, students, grassroots organizations, women’s groups, public health advocates, and
social movements from within Mexico. The events highlight the voices of those who face
a dire global water crisis daily - a lack of adequate sanitation, rising water rates, and
displacement from dams. However, many of these communities have successfully built
an alternative vision that puts health and human rights before profits, and they have built
local, community-based institutions to defend this vision.

Unfortunately, few of these institutions, groups and visions are represented inside
the Fourth World Water Forum. International groups have been shocked by the lack of
cooperation on behalf of the Fourth World Water Forum and the Mexican government to
incorporate alternative viewpoints in the program and activities of the official planning.
The Fourth World Water Forum is dominated by corporate interests, North
American and European governments, agencies and international financial institutions.
Despite rhetoric of participation and inclusion, the registration fee of $240-$600 US
dollars excludes public participation at the Forum. International activists have faced a
lack of support from both conference convenors and the Mexican government in
obtaining visas, effectively excluding activists from attendance.

In contrast, private corporations and groups such as the World Water Council
have played a strong role in the conference planning. The Council is a private think tank
headed by the CEO of a subsidiary of the transnational water giant Suez. Conference
convenors have continued to promote privatization, despite numerous examples of
private sector failures over the past year, from Argentina to Bolivia, and community
opposition to private sector involvement.

“Over the last 10 years, the privatisation of water has been a disaster for the
world’s poor – causing rate hikes, poor service, and water cutoffs. The movers and
shakers within the Fourth World Water Forum need to hear from those civil society
groups around the world who have been struggling against the corporate control of water
resources,” says Tamsyn East from the World Development Movement, which has been
fighting European governments who promote privatization around the world.

Because of these failures, international grassroots activists present at the
alternative events have a deep and growing revulsion to any attempts to place control
over water in the hands of transnational corporations, governments and international
organizations. Activists have seen the failure of these global water players to secure the
fundamental human right of safe, clean, affordable water for all.

Rallies in Defense of Water condemn the Fourth World Water Forum for
promoting water as a negotiable commodity to be bought and sold on the international
marketplace. The alternative events condemn the exclusionary nature of the official
Forum. In response and offering a truly democratic alternative, international grassroots
activists are bringing together people from across the world to defend water as a common
good and a public trust for all people and for the planet.

The Mexican movement, Asamblea Nacional en Defensa del Agua y la Tierra y
en contra de su privatización has spearheaded the organizing efforts in Mexico City.
"The Fourth World Water Forum says its theme is "local actions," but they have not even
helped local groups right here in Mexico, the host country, participate. There is an urgent
need to create alternative spaces for groups to express their struggles and solutions," says
Brenda Rodríguez, the spokeswoman of Coalición de Organizaciones por el Derecho de
Agua, which is a founder and active member of the Asemblea.

First, there is Mexico City itself: a mythic metropolis that represents all of the most intractable ills of the modern mega-city: it is the crime-ridden and corrupt hub of a nation where modernity still sits uncomfortably alongside ancient traditions and lifeways; it is tremendously overpopulated (estimates seem to vary between 8 and 18 and 23 million people, depending on your source and, I suppose, on whether you measure the part or the whole) with a significant portion of the population living in informal slums, and another significant portion living in luxurious mansions; it is incredibly polluted, and set in a deep valley where the smog sits unmoving for days and weeks at a time, turning your skin black with grime by the end of the day; and, perhaps most significantly for the water issue, it is a place where the naturally abundant ground water has been treated to all of the most illogical and massive management errors possible.

Once an island in a vast lake, Tenochtitlan was captured and conquered by the Spanish in 1521. Observers at the time, noting the city’s canals, aqueducts, floating gardens, dikes and bridges, called Tenochtitlan the Venice of the New World. But the Spanish Crown did not want a Venice, nor did they want to recognize a city more splendid than any in Europe – so they used slave labor to fill and drain the lakes, and to raze the surrounding forests. Standing in the Zocalo today, the vast plaza at the heart of the city, you would never dream that this was once an island of floating jungles, rather than an island of asphalt.

In the centuries since, the valley has been paved over and the groundwater drawn down so severely that parts of the city are now sinking at a rate of 20 inches a year. The more water is used, the more the city sinks, and the city is now drawing much of its water from aquifers hundreds of miles away, pumped over the mountains at great cost.

If any urban center represents a failure to cope sustainably with water issues, it is Mexico City.

The other reason why the World Water Forum is perfectly situated here is because prior to becoming the President of Mexico, Vicente Fox was President of Coca Cola Mexico. Thus beholden to the beverage that is second only to water in global consumption – known to the Zapatistas as “the black water of imperialism” – President Fox knows a thing or two about Public-Private Partnerships.

WHAT IS THE WORLD WATER FORUM?
For anyone outside of the Forum, it would be easy to believe that the event -- which will be held March 16 - 22 here in Mexico City -- is a UN-led international forum held for the good of us all. And while the "good of us all" part may be in the rhetoric of the World Water Council, the body in charge of the forum, the issue is much more complicated. Over the course of the week I hope to explore the meaning and the issues behind the Forum as well as to document the alternative events that will be taking place simultaneously and which I -- ever the objective documentary journalist -- will be taking part in.
In essence, this next week in Mexico City will contain two major events -- the World Water Forum itself (WWF), sponsored and run by the corporate water sector, and the Days in Defense of Water, sponsored and run by a coalition of Mexican and international ngo's and civil society groups, many of whom are loudly boycotting the WWF.

But no time for all that. For those of you in the Bay Area, a few weeks from now you can expect to hear about a few reportbacks by myself and my colleagues at Hesperian Foundation, and our friends from the International Indian Treaty Council and the People's Grocery. Beyond that, I'll leave off with a quote from Eduardo Galeano, regarding all of this:

"Utopia is like the horizon. You walk two steps, and it retreats two steps. You walk ten steps and it retreats ten steps.
So, then what is utopia for? For that -- to make you keep walking."

Hasta la proxima.....

Fortunately these issues have been taken into account, and the organizers have committed to doing better for the next meeting, expected to take place in Africa in a few years. In any case, by the last days of the People’s Health Assembly, many of the 1500 or so people present had crossed paths a few times and something of a community feeling emerged, despite the challenges. Outside of every venue informal groups gathered where one could easily join a conversation with people from Nigeria, Peru, Puerto Rico, Bangladesh, Switzerland and Argentina – and as in any event of this size, it is these informal meetings that, perhaps, have the most lasting impact on people’s lives and work when they go home. For my part, because I had been widely sharing the new Hesperian Foundation publications on water and sanitation – which we are obligated to distribute for free – I was fortunate to meet dozens of the people who will use these materials in their home communities. Many of them shared stories of their work with me, and expressed deep appreciation for the solidarity and support shown by those of us from the North who are able to do this work.

One young man from deep in the jungle in Peru especially struck me. Jeiser Suarez, an indigenous Shipibo man from near Iquitos, on the Peruvian Amazon, works tirelessly to maintain his culture’s traditions, to ensure that garbage and contamination are minimized, and to preserve the jungle ecosystem where he lives. Jeiser traveled 6 hours by canoe and 5 days by bus to get to the health assembly because he felt that meeting other people doing similar work would strengthen his resolve and his abilities and because, as he said very clearly, “My culture is in danger and we need allies.” After we had talked for some time, in one of the most affecting moments of the week, Jeiser gave me a gift – a necklace of Guayruro beads (red and black beans that grow along jungle waterways) bearing a crocodile tooth that his own grandfather had taken from an animal he’d hunted years ago. The beads are for protection, he explained, and the crocodile tooth for bravery.

Jeiser Suarez with friends

Anyone interested in learning more about the Shipibo might want to begin with the website that Jeiser told me about: www.shipibo.com

The final day and the Cuenca Declaration

At the end of each People’s Health Assembly a declaration is drafted that promises action on many of the themes that have been discussed during the meetings. In this case, the document is called The Cuenca Declaration; a draft of it was read to the entire assembly on Friday morning, with many breaks for applause and a time set aside after for comments. Because the Declaration is still in draft form, I cannot include any of it here, but those interested might check the People’s health Movement website (www.phmovement.org) in a few weeks.

A document that contains similar information, summing up many of the issues dealth with by PHM, is called Global Health Watch: an alternative health report, and was released at the gathering. I’m not sure whether or not the document is available on the web, but to give an idea of the kind of stands taken by PHM, here is the introduction to the report:

Origins

The Global Health Watch comes out of one of the largest ever civil society
mobilizations in health. Its roots lie in the influential and lasting campaigns
of the 1970s and 1980s when activists across the world challenged the global
health divide between North and South and rich and poor. They formulated
practical proposals for change and influenced the content of the ground-breaking
1978 Alma Ata Declaration. Community-based health care, the essential
drugs list and controls on the marketing of infant formula are just some of
the results of this advocacy, which has changed the lives of millions of people
for the better.

But aren’t there enough world health and development reports already? The
World Health Report, produced by the WHO; the Human Development Report
compiled by the United Nations Development Programme; an annual report
produced by UNAIDS; the annual State of the World’s Children produced by
UNICEF; and the World Development Report issued by the World Bank every
year. The Global Health Watch is different, however. The paragraphs below
outline how and why health workers from all over the world have expressed a
need for such a report.

The politics of health

The co-existence of wealth and widespread, severe poverty suggests that the
latter can be avoided. The cost of achieving and maintaining universal access
to basic education, basic health care, adequate food, and safe water and sanitation
for all has been estimated at less than 4% of the combined wealth of the
225 richest people in the world (UNDP 1998: 30). In many countries in which
hunger is prevalent, there is enough productive land to feed their populations
many times over. Alternative social, political and economic arrangements at a
national and global level could change this stark reality.

UNICEF has devised a conceptual model for explaining child morbidity
and mortality. It states that, amongst other factors, the political, social and
economic systems that determine how resources are used and controlled need
to be considered so as to determine the number and distribution of children
who do not have sufficient access to food, child care, clean water, sanitation
and health services .

The UNICEF model is applicable to other aspects of health (for example,
AIDS and maternal health) and echoes the analytical approach used by the
Watch to highlight how the distribution of power, political influence and economic
resources shapes the pattern of health globally.

Poverty and development as a public health issue

Poverty is the biggest epidemic that the global public health community
faces. It underlies most cases of under-nutrition, fuels the spread of many
diseases and deepens vulnerability to the effects of illness and trauma. Poor
countries are unable to give their health and social services adequate resources, resulting in a poverty of health systems that compounds poverty at the
household and community levels.

Health workers engage with the health effects of illiteracy; the lack of access
to clean water and sanitation; hunger and food insecurity; the degradation of
the environment; and militarism and conflict. These public health issues highlight
the common challenges shared by health workers, teachers, engineers,
geographers, farmers and biologists, to name just a few professions in fulfilling
the universal right to health and dignity. The Watch aims to promote health
as a theme that can bring together different sectors of civil society around a
common agenda for human development and social justice.

Inequity

Increasing levels of poverty have been accompanied by growing inequality.
The income gap between the fifth of the world’s people living in the richest
countries and the fifth of the poorest was 74 to 1 in 1997, up from 60 to 1 in
1990, 30 to 1 in 1960, and 11 to 1 in 1913. The world’s 200 richest people more
than doubled their net worth in the four years to 1998 to more than $1 trillion.
The assets of the top three billionaires are worth more than the combined GNP
of all least developed countries and their 600 million people (UNDP 1999).
Although inequality is commonly described in terms of differences between
rich and poor countries, one fifth of the richest people in the world come from
developing countries (Navarro 2004). Similarly, poverty and widening disparities
are not confined to poor countries – inequalities have risen in wealthy
nations over the past two decades.

The Watch therefore emphasizes not just poverty, but also the relationship
between rich and poor, between the powerful and the marginalized. Improving
the situation of the world’s poor cannot be achieved through aid or charity
alone; profoundly unequal power relationships need to be tackled first and
foremost. Health professionals can influence many of the decisions that will
lead to a fairer distribution of wealth.

Human rights and responsibilities

Article 25.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that ‘everyone
has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health of himself and
of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary
social services’. Article 12.1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social
and Cultural Rights recognizes the ‘right of everyone to the enjoyment of the
highest attainable standard of physical and mental health’.

Given global integration, governments, corporate actors and civil society
have transnational duties and responsibilities towards the fulfilment of universal
human rights. At present, the emphasis in human rights discourse is on
the responsibilities of governments towards their own citizens. Transnational
responsibilities for the fulfilment of human rights tend to be limited to avoiding
or preventing direct violations of the civil liberties of citizens of another
country, or merely invoke a weak humanitarian response to help out with aid
and other forms of assistance. Economic cooperation with corrupt and undemocratic
governments is not considered a human rights transgression, nor
is the maintenance of trade rules that perpetuate or deepen severe poverty.
In sum, the Watch embodies a human rights perspective that emphasizes
social and economic rights; identifies political and economic institutions,
including the manner in which economic relationships are organized and
structured, as being beholden to human rights declarations; and calls for a
greater recognition of transnational responsibilities towards the fulfillment of
human rights.

Mobilizing civil society and holding institutions to account

In light of the evidence that social, political and economic arrangements
are failing to address the current state of ill-health, poverty and inequity adequately,
a stronger mobilization of civil society committed to the fulfilment of
human rights is needed. The Global Health Watch is explicitly linked to many
civil society struggles for health and justice. Many of the individuals, networks
and NGOs associated with this report participate in civil society mobilization,
lobbying efforts, policy advocacy and development work on the ground. The
Watch draws on their experiences and offers credible analysis to strengthen
their work.

Part of the aim of this alternative world health report, therefore, is to
present an analysis of the performance and effect of key institutions that have
a responsibility for promoting global health. Health and development reports
produced, for example, by the WHO, UNAIDS and the World Bank tend not to
include themselves in the analysis of factors that are promoting or negatively
impacting on health. The Watch hopes to fill this gap and provide another
means of strengthening civil society’s ability to engage with the determinants
of ill health.

Overview of the Global Health Watch

The report is divided into six sections. Part A looks at how political and
economic change at the global level influences people’s health and well-being
worldwide, noting how little control individuals have over these changes. It
points to solutions for redressing global imbalances and shows how few of the
promises made to developing countries in past years have been kept.
Part B carves out an agenda for the public sector’s role in health, with a
special focus on low- and middle-income countries. Its first chapter asserts that
the Primary Health Care Approach adopted by the world’s health ministers in
the late 1970s is still relevant today, but that the public sector role in health is
under threat, and that commercialization of health care has proceeded apace
in the last two decades to the detriment of health. It points to the limitations of
current efforts to address health priorities through selective health care interventions
and pro-poor targeting. The chapter argues for a greater commitment
to universal health care systems and for renewed investment in the public sector.
Subsequent chapters on medicines and gene technology take up the theme
of commercialization and suggest ways in which the public sector role can be
strengthened. Other chapters explore two controversial issues – health worker
migration in low-income countries that are short of health personnel; and the
political struggle over sexual and reproductive rights, including analysis of how
health care is connected to broader debates about poverty, politics and gender
injustice.

We encourage you to spread the word about the Watch widely. It is freely
available on the web and on CD from the three co-ordinating organizations:
People’s Health Movement, the Global Equity Gauge Alliance and Medact. To
comment on anything in this volume or make suggestions for the next Global
Health Watch in 2007–8, please contact any of the co-ordinating organizations
at ghw@hst.org.za.
Further information
People’s Health Movement (www.phmovement.org)
Global Equity Gauge Alliance (www.gega.org.za)
Medact (www.medact.org)

Before the journey home…

The day after the closing ceremony of the assembly, I was preparing to fly home when my old friend Rafael showed up and convinced me to stay on a few days to visit some projects and some interesting places…so I did. That same day we collected our Yaqui friend Angel Valencia, our Zapotec friend Saul Vicente and Francisco Mocoso, the President of Ecuador’s Condor Loma Foundation – a small NGO devoted to environmental and cultural preservation – and piled in a pick-up truck to visit some of Condor Loma’s conservation projects high in the Andes.

It’d been too long since I’d taken a fast, bumpy cold ride in the back of a pick-up through the Latin American countryside, and I felt entirely at home as we ascended out of the Cuenca valley to the central cordillera of the Andes. About an hour out of town we came to one of Condor Loma’s pilot projects – a small town where they’ve built open reservoirs to capture rainwater and mountain runoff to feed farm irrigation. We stopped to speak with a couple of campesinos who were drying beans and ended up staying for a quick drink of aguardiente to talk about their hopes for another rainwater reservoir. When we left, the friendly – and now just-ever-so-slightly-drunk – campesinos offered us some of their beans to plant, which all of us gladly accepted.

A healthy, meandering river high in the Andes

An Andean home

Continuing on, we entered a preserve where Francisco and others had been restoring vegetation to the hillsides using different methods, with the hope of seeking funds to do larger scale watershed protection projects throughout the Andes. The most interesting method we saw was one that Francisco himself had pioneered: he built worm bins across a gulley, from top to bottom, so that rainwater would collect worm guano as it flowed down the hill and fertilize the soil. Entire hillsides that had been barren were no green with brush thanks to this simple method.

Simple irrigation using a hollow log

As darkness fell we returned to Cuenca to see Angel off to the airport.

Angel Valencia

The next day Saul, Francisco, Raphael and I piled into Raphael’s ’78 Ford for the day-long drive to Banos, to get Saul to the airport and the rest of us to the final visit of my stay in Ecuador. That last day turned out to be the gem of my visit.

Descending from Banos towards the Amazon is the Pastaza River Valley, a deep and narrow canyon dropping thousands of feet and awash in green towering peaks, crashing white waterfalls, and incredible views of volcanoes both near and distant. Due to the rapid descent from cordillera to altiplano to cloudforest to primary rainforest – in a 15 minute drive you descend 2400 feet in altitude – this canyon is home to some of the greatest biodiversity on earth. The road, which follows along above the river, is a thin ribbon running between two of Ecuador’s most inaccessible protected areas – Parque Nacional Yanuncay and Parque Nacional Sangay. Rumors claim that Yanuncay is where the lost Inca treasure is buried, and numerous expeditions have literally vanished inside the remote territory. Parque Sangay, crowned by the snow capped volcano Sangay which erupts every 20 minutes, is equally inaccessible, and is claimed to be the home of 16 ancient pyramids known as the Temple of the Jaguar.

At the spot where the river is thinnest, we left the car behind and descended a path towards some waterfalls known to the public as the Paylon del Diablo – the Devil’s Pylon – but known by locals as Condor Pacha because of the stone figure of an earthly condor that rises out of the falls. Just below the falls a long rope-bridge crosses the river, and we crossed and were welcomed by Paul, the caretaker. This spot, with its view of the falls and its incredible flora, was until recently a tourist attraction visited by thousands of trash-throwing, flora-trampling, coca-cola drinking visitors. But as little as a year ago the owners of the place – an Israeli family – realized that it was too special to treat it this way and they hired Paul, an ecologist from Cuenca, to take charge. His first decision was to close it off to tourists and invite only scientists, environmentalists and students of traditional medicine to visit the part known as “El Otro Lado” – the other side. Ironically, I had visited the place as a tourist a few years back, but now I had the honor of being welcomed into the inner sanctum.

Paul lead us down the path to a fully-equipped cabin where we began to talk and talk and talk about the temples hidden deep in the jungle, about the 92 endemic species of orchids, about the ancient paths that ran through here connecting the Amazon and the Andes. How to educate people about places like this, how to begin with the simplest actions like preventing littering and continue until an understanding of watersheds and traditional cultures and the vaster questions of ecology were built. Paul and the others of Condor Loma made it clear that their mission was nothing less than to protect the entire Ecuadorian Amazon from destruction, and that they began here, at the falls of Condor Pacha because this river valley is the “umbilical cord of the Amazon.” Francisco cut in – “no, we’re not beginning here, we’re beginning up in the Andes – this is the halfway point. To protect the Amazon, you have to protect the Andes.”

After a few hours, as the sun had fallen and the intermittent rain of the cloudforest wetted our hair, we built a fire, and through the night we talked and planned and committed ourselves to continue educating, to continue pushing for human rights and protection of natural resources, to spend every waking moment raising consciousness – our own and that of others – about the work that needs to be done here and everywhere. Towards dawn, when the moon pushed through the thick jungle clouds, we ascended to a smaller waterfall, and, in the dark of night, darker for being jungle, bathed in the falls. Returning to the house, a few hours of sleep as the sun rose and then the long, dull journey home…

Andean town deep in a high valley

The mighty Mount Chimborazo

After that video, Sherri showed Gold, Greed and Genocide, a great and horrific short documentary made by Pratap Chatterjee about the California Gold Rush and its impact on the California natives. I did simultaneous translation for the crowd, and I can tell you that its exhausting translating phrases like¨: "the government of Calfornia paid $5 each for the heads of the Indians," and "boys were sold into slavery for $60 dollars, girls for up to $400." The film generated a lot of interest, especially because, as I´ve seen before, most people outside the US (and inside) don´t realize that any native peoples are left in the US. In any case, the hope here is in the mercury education project being carried out by the Indian Treaty Council for which I co-wrote a manual through Hesperian Foundation. Sherri and others travel to reservations and rancherias around California educating about the toxic legac of the gold rush. After that film, Angel Valencia, our Yaqui friend, showed "Huicholes y Plaguicidas" a short doc about the horrors of pesticide poisoning. After the film, he spoke, and got extremely emotional, because this is so clearly the extermination of his people. "Why is the life of a white child more valuable than the life of a Yaqui child, or an Ecuadora child, or a Peruvian child? This canot go on!," Angel said, in tears. He insisted then on showing another film about native peoples and toxics, and the night grew heavier, with the room sinking into near despair.

Still, in a session earlier that day about deep ecology, the presenters offered a new paradigm for global health, which does offer hope if we can carry it forward. Doctor Julio Monsalvo of Argentina and Sandra Isable Payan of Colombia spoke beautifully about what they call "Primary Health Care for Ecosystems". What they are promoting is a model of human health which includes the greater ecosphere, and takes into account a model of "power with, not power over", feminine being, recognition of natural cycles and energy flows, a rejection of dualities like good/evil, sick/healthy, masculine/feminine, and so forth, and a recognition of the sacred nature of, well, nature. Julio specifically describes the six A´s that make up health: "agua, aire, alimento, abrigo, amor, y arte." That is, water, air, food, clothing and shelter, love, and art.

The session on primary health care for ecosystems continues today, and I will present a discussion on ecological sanitation, that most humble aspect of the paradigm of integrated environmental health. Hesperian´s booklet on sanitation will be presented, and I´m excietd to present it in the context of health and deep ecology. And its exciting to see how much real interest there is in the subject -- I can´t pull the books out of my bag without being surrounded by community health workers clamoring for their copy....

And finally, back to the horrors that surround us, a few photos of a performance revealing the perceptions of American imperialism:

After the session we were asked to put together an article for the People´s Health Assembly newspaper that comes out at here everyday, so Anil and I, with the help of Sherri Norris and Angel Valencia of the International Indian Treaty Council, set ourselves up in a smoky, atmospheric little bar, and wrote this little news item about it:

PHM Should Join the Global Campaign for Right to Water Treaty

This year is the start of the International Decade for Action “Water for Life”, and communities around the world desperately need access to safe, sufficient, affordable water. PHM has already drafted a declaration supporting the movement for a right to water (see www.righttowater.net). At PHA2, with representation from peoples worldwide, we are granted a unique opportunity to secure this fundamental collective right.

In fact, the People´s Health Movement is uniquely situated to move this kind of Treaty forward, because many people within the movement are involved in policy at different levels. Every year, the PHM steering committee attends the World Health Assembly in Geneva and each country representative lobbies his or her Minister of Health on the PHM platform. In this way, an common global agenda is pushed forward. At the same time, groups like the Indian Treaty Council, who represent Indigenous Peoples of the Americas at the United Nations, push for these policies there, and direct action oriented groups like the Treatment Action Campaign, the disability rights movement, and the anti-war movement, bring these agendas to the streets.

At this point in the dispatch, I might add again that there is so much going on, on so many levels, that the bits and pieces I am offering are a small view into the events. Another major theme of the last few days has been militarization and war, with an Iraqi doctor, Dr. Salam Ismael giving a grueling testimony of events there, along with testimonies from the war in the Congo, the fumigations of Plan Colombia, the health crisis in Chiapas, and so forth. Fortunately I missed the session and the depression it caused in hundreds of attendees. Speaking with Brahm Amadi about it this morning, we reenforced our notion -- and Brahm and People´s Grocery are a great example of this -- that while we must face the realities of our time, it is our job as activists to offer hope, to imagine alternatives, to struggle with dignity for a better future.

The poet Diane DiPrima has said "There is only one war -- the war against the imagination." All other wars partake of this central strategy of denying vision, denying creativity, denying hope. My personal hope for a gathering such as this one is that, alongside the gruesome news from all quarters of the world, our collective energies will emerge into yet more visions for a positive future and yet more creative strategies for change.

For media enquiries: +593 919 6 1712 / +593 9873 9376 / +593 9453
0115 / +593 9156 2935