A group of university students under the group The Journey and Haven Entertainment organised a conscious hip hop festival to oppose the proposed Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) between the European Union and Africa. This effort is part of a wider campaign by citizens, farmers' unions, civil society, and religious groups to stop the government from signing the proposed agreement which, according to economists and experts in international trade, are potentially detrimental to the development agenda and may exacerbate poverty in Kenya and other developing countries.
Health equity in economic and trade policies
Kenyan hip-hop artists rap against Europe's unfair trade proposals
Nairobi Now (Arts and Culture Events): 12 September 2007
International Health Partnership
Affiliated Network for Social Accountability, 22 August 2007
The UK Prime Minister and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have released a joint statement on a new International Health Partnership, which will bring together major donor countries, including Britain and Germany, and key international agencies such as the World Bank and the World Health Organisation. The agreement was developed with bilateral, international health and funding agencies, developing countries, and foundations; it commits all artners to: working with country owned plans; creating a mechanism to agree donor support to national plans; coordinating their efforts on the ground; and focussing on the creation of sustainable health systems which deliver improved outcomes. Partners will work together to ensure that health plans are well designed, well supported and well implemented.
Neoliberalism, Globalization, and Inequalities: Consequences for Health and Quality of Life
Navarro V: Baywood Publishing
This book critically analyses the conventional wisdom in the political, economic, and academic establishments of neoliberalism and globalisation as good for people's health and quality of life.
Stop the EPA's offensive by the EU against the Southern African Development Community!
People's Summit, Southern Africa
Hundreds of representatives of social and labour organisations, faith based, community-based and health networks, small farmers, traders, women and youth organisations, and developmental, human rights and environmental NGOs from across the whole of the Southern African region gathered in a Peoples Summit in Lusaka, Zambia, 15-16 August 2007, parallel to the SADC Heads of State summit. They discussed many issues of common concern and agreed that there is now an urgent generalised threat hanging over the whole future of SADC. This arises from the insistence of the European Union (EU) that SADC, like other regional groupings in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (the ACP countries) must sign a far-reaching trade liberalisation agreement with the EU. Participants claim this has been misleadingly entitled an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), despite already witnessing the damaging effects of trade liberalisation.
The rise and predictable fall of globalized industrial agriculture: A report from the international forum on globalization
Barker D: International Forum on Globalization (IFG), 2007
Few people are aware how much national and regional food systems are impacted by international policies and trade rules is on national and regional food systems—this report makes these links and offers alternative responses. It also addresses agriculture and global warming, how to move organic and local food models forward, and discusses other emerging issues as well. The International Forum on Globalization (IFG) is a research and educational institution comprised of leading scholars, economists, researchers, and activists from around the globe.
WTO Offers New Proposal to Break Deadlock
Mekay E: IPS News, 17 July 2007
The World Trade Organisation (WTO) has proposed a new plan to unlock global trade talks that have stalled over farm subsidies in rich countries and reluctance by poor nations to further open their markets for Western goods and services without reciprocation from industrialised nations. But analysts who studied the new text warned that it still leaves rich countries' trade protections largely intact, while giving poor nations little in return.
Does the TRIPS agreement strike the right balance?
Charveriat C, Bale H: WTO Forum Video Debate
This video debate asks: 'Does the TRIPS agreement strike the right balance between the rights of governments and the rights of patent holders?'
EU confronts its unhealthy policy
South-North Development Monitor (SUNS) 6299, 24 July 2007
The European Union's only directly elected institution is at loggerheads with the bloc's 27 governments over a measure officially designed to ensure that poor countries have access to affordable medicines. In 2003, the EU helped broker a temporary waiver to the World Trade Organisation's (WTO) agreement on intellectual property rights, which is known by the acronym TRIPS. Meeting on July 17, however, the European Parliament's committee on international trade decided to delay giving its assent to ratification because it is not satisfied that the EU is doing enough to boost the supply of vital drugs to the needy.
Globalization and social determinants of health: Introduction and methodological background (part 1 of 3)
Labonté R and Schrecker T: Globalization and Health 3:5, 19 June 2007
Globalisation is a key context for the study of social determinants of health (SDH). Broadly stated, SDH are the conditions in which people live and work, and that affect their opportunities to lead healthy lives. This first article of a three-part series, describes the origins of the series in work conducted for the Globalization Knowledge Network of the World Health Organization's Commission on Social Determinants of Health and in the Commission's specific concern with health equity. This paper explains the rationale for defining globalisation with reference to the emergence of a global marketplace, and the economic and political choices that have facilitated that emergence. It identifies a number of conceptual milestones in studying the relation between globalisation and SDH over the period 1987–2005, and shows that because globalisation comprises multiple, interacting policy dynamics, reliance on evidence from multiple disciplines (transdisciplinarity) and research methodologies is required. So, too, is explicit recognition of the uncertainties associated with linking globalisation – the quintessential "upstream" variable – with changes in SDH and in health outcomes.
Globalization and social determinants of health: Promoting health equity in global governance (part 3 of 3)
Labonté R and Schrecker T: Globalization and Health 3:5, 19 June 2007
This article is the third in a three-part review of research on globalisation and the social determinants of health (SDH). The third article of the series discusses how interventions to reduce health inequities by way of SDH are inextricably linked with social protection, economic management and development strategy.