UN Summit on non-communicable diseases
Population: The elephant in the room
Click here for March report on WHO and the UN Summit
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Click here for May report on NCD Alliance and the UN Summit
Click here for July report on civil society, industry and the UN Summit
Click here for August report on the summit's Political Declaration
Click here for WN editorial on the summit
Click here for WN commentary on the summit by Philip James
Click here for WN comments on the summit by various authors
Shantytowns in Nairobi , Kenya (left) and in Rio de Janeiro , Brazil, (right). The UN NCD Summit so far is overlooking the population explosion. Why?
UN Summit on NCDs: What else is missing from the Political Declaration
Analysis of recent drafts of the UN NCD summit Political Declaration, also known as the Outcomes Document, available here as a pdf, shows other omissions. There is little or no mention of many other crucial issues, such as food producers, rural economies, poverty, urbanisation, economic globalisation, transnational industry, or food processing. For details see the editorial in this month's World Nutrition.
The news team reports. The UN Summit on non-communicable diseases, to be held in New York this month on 19-20 September, seems to be ignoring issues of human population. There is no reference to the colossal rise in human population, most of all since 1950, in the draft Political Declaration due to be finally revised, agreed and issued. This is particularly odd, since other things being equal, the more people there are, the more non-communicable disease there will be.
Commentators who want the Declaration to be an adequate guide to member states, especially in parts of the world where population levels continue to soar, regard this as a strange and indefensible omission. It is known that non-communicable diseases are afflicting impoverished countries and populations. It is estimated that the billion people who now live in slums and shantytowns, as shown in the pictures above, will rise to two billion by 2025, an increase even faster than the general rise in human population.
In a magisterial review published earlier this year (1), available here as a pdf, Tony McMichael and Colin Butler of the Australian National University point out that human activity (its 'environmental footprint') is now about 1.4 times the earth's carrying capacity, and rising. This calculation has vast implications. For a start, it contradicts the notion that the right solutions to global population health involve more growth, in whatever forms this takes – more economic activity, more use of energy, more trade, more capitalised agriculture and manufacture, more technology, more urbanisation, more drugs and surgical and medical treatment. We are all ecologists now, and from the ecological point of view, these are all roads to human immiseration and eventually even extinction.
Why no mention of population?
So why is human population being ignored in the documents being prepared for the UN NCD summit? One answer is cynical. This is that the paradigms within which practically all policy-makers now work, imply that growth is good and the more growth, the better. Leading members of the NCD Alliance, representing global organisations concerned with diabetes, heart disease, cancer and respiratory diseases, want more medical treatment, though how this can prevent disease is unclear. Lower-income member states want economic growth and expansion, meaning greater 'development'.
The transnational food production industry and its supporters, a massive influence on the shaping of the summit, want bigger business, more energy-greedy methods of manufacture, and more trade in ultra-processed products that may contain somewhat less trans-fats and salt than the original formulations. At the highest level, the UN wants and feels it needs to make agreements that are welcomed by the US, the EC and other power blocs whose overall policies remain committed to economic growth and 'free trade'. So no wonder nobody is mentioning the elephant in the room – population.
A kinder answer is that the most potent drivers of the pandemics of non-communicable diseases are beyond the knowledge and capacity of the good people who have been preparing the documents for the NCD summit. Have there been members of the drafting teams who are environmentalists, ecologists, or economists who see the dangers in relentless drive for growth? It seems unlikely. Perhaps the best outcome of the summit is an acknowledgement that the process needs to start again – but soon, before the room fills up with and is stunk out by the evacuations of the elephant.
Reference
- McMichael AJ, Butler CD. Promoting global population health while constraining the environmental footprint. Annual Reviews of Public Health 2011, 32, 179-197.
