Health implications of the crisis in finance and trade

This year's third UCL Institute for Global Health (IGH) Symposium, held on 21 January 2009, was a five-person panel and audience discussion of 'The Crisis in Global Finance and Trade: What are the implications for health??. Ann Pettifor, co-founder of the Jubilee 2000 debt cancellation campaign, indicated that present policymakers remain in thrall to the financial sector ' despite its track record. She called for a reversal of the massive deregulation of the sector and a reintroduction of the Keynesian subordination of the financial sector's interests to that of the 'real economy'. Professor Richard Smith, an economist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said that international trade governance, mainly through the WTO, was focused and exercised within a legal framework; in contrast, international health governance was amorphous, unstructured and unenforceable. For example, where the WTO's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights protection of pharmaceuticals was legally binding, the WHO's Model List of Essential Medicines was merely advisory. Because of this, trade always trumps health. The health community must become more sensitised to and engaged with these issues.