Join Miguel García, PHM’s Comms Officer and Charter4Health host, in a fresh and direct conversation with Fran Baum, a special guest to talk about The struggle for health is a struggle for liberation and against capitalism, The PHM Call To Action proclaimed at the Fifth People's Health Assembly held in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in April 2024, a very strong document that defines the struggle for health for the coming years and that comes at a time of systemic crises in the right to health around the world.
Fran Baum, is one of PHM founding members, she is a human rights and health rights activist, Fran Baum is a public health social scientist with a special interest in creating healthy, equitable and sustainable societies. She is a professor of health equity at The Stretton Institute, The University of Adelaide, Australia.
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Program Transcript
Fran Baum: Hola… so… we came to the end of the assembly and we have a call to action, one thing I want to say is thank you to all the contributions/
We thought that it would be nice if young comrades should read parts of the declaration. We do not have enough time for the whole, so we’re going to do that, we are going to start with Layth from Palestine… if only all the other people can come up to the stage so that we can do that as quickly as possible… Damiana, Connie, Karina, Vivi, Michael, Alex, Agustina and Karina from Guatemala.
Layth Hanbali: Our Call to Action includes the demands and commitments of the People’s Health Movement following the debates and discussion leading up to and during the 5th People’s Health Assembly held in Mar del Plata, Argentina. It should be read in conjunction with the PHA5 Background Paper: The Struggle for Health: Confronting the role of Capitalism and Imperialism.
Our Call to Action envisages a world where people can enjoy their lives to the fullest, with dignified work, full participation in health issues and in which the political, economic, cultural and social obstacles and limitations that impede the existence of comprehensive and quality health and education systems are eliminated. Our vision is based on Living Well -Buen Vivir- and promotion of the health of Mother Earth.
Miguel Garcia: In this episode of Charter for Health a special guest to talk about The struggle for health is a struggle for liberation and against capitalism, The PHM Call to action proclaimed at the fifth people's health assembly held in Mar del Plata Argentina in April 2024,
a very strong document that defines the struggle for health for the coming years and that comes at a time of systemic crises in the right to health around the world.
Welcome to Charter for Health a PHM podcast series on the right to health
Hear the voices and insights of heath rights defenders at the forefront of the struggle for Health for All from around the world.
I am your Host Miguel Garcia and this is Charter for Health, a new podcast series from PHM Global.
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Our guest is Fran Baum, she is one of PHM founding members, she is a human rights and health rights activist, Fran Baum is a public health social scientist with a special interest in creating healthy, equitable and sustainable societies.
She is a professor of health equity at The Stretton Institute, The University of Adelaide, Australia.
Hello Fran, welcome to the program, thank you for joining us
Fran Baum: Hi Miguel, nice to see you.
Miguel Garcia: I want to start by asking you. How did the People's Health movement arrive in Mar del Plata for the People's Health assembly after six years of the last assembly in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and after a World pandemic.
Fran Baum: Yeah, well, Normally the People's Health Improvement tries to have an assembly every five years, but obviously covid really interfered with that and our first people's Health assembly was in 2000 in Bangladesh then we had one in Ecuador in 2005 and then in South Africa and then in Bangladesh again in 2018, and then finally despite Covid we managed just in six years to have one in Argentina in Mar Del Plata in April this year 2024.
From and result of a lot of work by activists around the world to bring everybody together. It wasn't easy, there were lots of problems with visas and you know, whether people could travel and it's quite expensive to travel to Latin America from Europe and from the Pacific and Asia. So it was remarkable that we got over 600 people gathered in Mar del Plata.
Miguel Garcia: From Savar in 2000 to Mar del Plata the PHM has come a long way. What has changed in the struggle for health in this almost 25 years.
Fran Baum: Well, it's kind of sad because things got worse in 2000. We were saying well, we haven't achieved health for all that was called for in the Alma Ata declaration and we felt that who was out of touch with people's health. And so instead of having a World Health assembly, we wanted to have a People's Health assembly and I wish was that we would achieve our slogan then was not health for all by, but health for all now, but sadly what's happened in the last 24 years is that things have got worse, capitalism has become more aggressive the sort of imperialist nature of it with military the growth of the military industry that kind of advance of the fossil fuel Industries, despite the fear of global warming and its consequences and perhaps more than anything. This is seen in the widening inequities between people and massive accumulation of wealth for some people, Massive growth in the power of transnational corporations with CEOs like the head of Amazon who earns over 6,000 times that of the average wage of his workers is just obscene levels of white wealth and that's just accelerated since 2000 despite lots of activism around the world.
Miguel Garcia: So, What are the lessons learned from these gatherings every 5 years? And What is the importance of the assemblies for the movement?
Fran Baum: Yeah, I think the most important assembly is that people get inspired? You know, I think everybody who was in Mar Del Plata went away feeling that there is some hope that with solidarity with a class struggle with a struggle against imperialism against patriarchy against capitalism. Then things could be different. So there's that basic thing of people coming together and feeling that there is some hope and being inspired but it's also a chance for us to look at all our found documents like the People's Health Charter and every assembly we put out a kind of call to action and the one that we developed in Mar Del Plata really built on all the previous declarations that we've had but was also updated to reflect the more difficult situation that we see that the world is in and the sort of intensifying crisis of capitalism, you know for working people for indigenous people. There's always been a crisis of capitalism, but there's no doubt that it's deepening at the moment.
Miguel Garcia: the call to action: the struggle for health is a struggle for Liberation and against capitalism and imperialism. It's a very robust and ambitious document in which the PHM makes some demands and commits itself to achieving some goals in the struggle for health for the next few years. So, What is the engagement and the impact that the PHM is expecting to get from it and can it be achieved?
Fran Baum: Well, I mean it's a document it's you know, it's something written on a piece of paper and that has its limits but it is a call to action and I know in both in country in people's Health movement country circles and in our regional networks and in our thematic groups people are looking at the call to action and saying well, what can we do in our region? and is a big call to action. It's got lots of action points and no thematic group, no region, no country is going to be doing everything, but hopefully somewhere in the PHM movement people will be responding to most of most of the demands that we've made. You know, we really looked at ecosystems, food energy and climate and we have an active thematic Circle in that area and people so active in the countries. We looked at the importance of challenging imperialists in capitalist knowledge and looked at the vast amount of diverse knowledge that is particularly indigenous knowledge, but also ancestral knowledge and feminists and decolonial knowledge.
So just saying that there's you know, we're recording this the week after Noam Chomsky died and then Chomsky talked about the whole of manufacturing consent and the way in which the sort of capitalist World closes down discussion of alternative possibilities. So what we're hoping to do with the call to action is say: hey capitalism isn't here forever, It's probably… is just a stage, we can imagine futures that are different. So I think that's another really important thing about that knowledge is we also, you know, are very clear that we want to resist the growth of corporatization, resist the ways in which transnational corporations are becoming so powerful in the world, and there's some very real things we can do there about calling out the practices of those corporations, the way that they can continue to produce unhealthy unsafe products. They can continue to exploit workers particularly in low and middle income countries. So that that's a really important thing that we can do.
You know, obviously the whole issue of war and occupation and forced migration has become even more pressing and Mild departure. We had amazing sessions on Palestine and our Palestinian colleagues were only able to join us by Zoom, but there was such strong solidarity about the Injustice of the occupation in Palestine and the fact that that those injustices go back to at least the 1940s and probably way before that and just the way that Palestinian people are living under this terrible system of apartheid and that the recent events in Gaza are just one expression of that the most awful expression of that but we recognize and offered lots of solidarity to to our comrades in Palestine. We've also called for a transformation of Health Systems. We think that's absolutely vital; covid really highlighted the inequities in Health Systems around the world and we've expressed huge concern about the privatization of Health Systems and and the sort of undermining of good publicly provided publicly financed health services and just how much more effective they are in so many ways particularly for people who are poor particularly for people who don't have the means to buy in a privatized system because we know privatized systems just create inequities.
And we also focused on gender justice in health and looked at all the ways in which many of the gains and gender justice are being threatened in some countries, you know, one back on reproductive Health rights increasing violence against women in many countries and a whole questioning of the importance of gender. So, you know there we were and are gender justice Circle really will carry on that work in a very strong way, but it is a real struggle.
So, you know in the future the way we think that the call to action, it can't just be the actions of PHM, it has to be PHM converging with other social movements, of determining, you know, which social movements share the same values and ideologies and Analysis as us, and how can we build stronger links with them… I know in our region for instance, We're having discussions with the boycott the boycott disinvestment and sanctions movement in relation to Israel and we've been talking to that movement both within Australia, but also within the asia-pacific region, and thinking about how can PHM intensify their efforts so that that's you know, some of the ways that we're taking it forward. We recognize of course that we're a small movement but that we have huge passion. We have a network of people around the world who are very passionate about this and we all recognize that the powerful forces that we're up against and and how they're becoming more powerful and and also more aggressive I think in the pursuit of the aims of sort of profit and and hanging on to the resources that they've gotten trying to expand those.
Miguel Garcia: I want to take you a little back to talk about the methodology of the Call to Action, it was developed after a very strong background paper The Struggle for Health: Confronting the Role of Capitalism and Imperialism. Walk us through the process, how was it developed?
Fran Baum: well that process of developing that background paper was led by David Legge who's a long-term, one of the founding members of PHM, a long-term previous member of the steering council of PHM. And he had a group of us who worked with him mainly in terms of meetings over zoom and email and that paper really was a situation and Analysis of where we are in the world, what is the situation of capitalism at this point in the 21st century? And how is that affecting People's Health? And, you know, what are some of the things we might do about that. So that was an amazing base on which to develop the call to action and then pretty much the same members of that group, but with some other people added then worked on that on the call to action before the assembly and people would talk within their thematic circles that were some discussions and countries and regions. So that by the time we started this assembly, or I think the week before, we were able to send out a draft of that call to action to everyone who was coming to the assembly, and then during this assembly there were spaces where the draft call to action was discussed that also happened in the meetings of the regions and the Thematic groups and and a group of us worked to take in all that information and revised that draft, So that by the time we got to the last day of the assembly with collated all that material and the sum of the young members of PHM presented that to the assembly and it was unanimously endorsed by everybody there subsequently there were a few more comments that came in and we did have one more meeting of our group and made some further amendments to update some of the information that people perhaps hadn't got in in time or it hadn't been taken into account sufficiently when we were drafting it. So really it was a pretty participatory process that we went through to produce it.
Miguel Garcia: How did the Latin American peoples' ancestral concept of Buen Vivir was introduced in the discussions of the assembly and how is it reflected in the call to action?
Fran Baum: well, I think it's very strongly reflected in the call to action particularly in that section on alternative knowledge's because we really present it as an alternative way of seeing the world, you know of Vivi Camancho from Bolivia was very Central to bringing that perspective into the call to action and she talked about the importance of honoring Mother Earth of not just seeing not seeing nature as something to turn into a resources and profit but as something to be valued in its own, right and as something that people should be living much more in harmony with and that if we had a world where that was happening then everybody would be much healthier because that there wouldn't be this kind of hyper exploit exploitation of resources and then a hyper consumerism to kind of can first of all to produce the resources, but then to consume them in all sorts of ways that seem encouraged by advertising that's encouraged by social media and that really creates a situation where there's kind of over-consumption in some countries and complete under consumption in other countries and and the idea of living in a way that's in harmony with nature has been lost to so many communities and that's where I think indigenous communities really have a lot of lessons for other communities because they haven't lost that linked to culture and land and I know in Australia my indigenous comrades that is absolutely vital to them that you know, being part of the land knowing your ancestors were part of that land and knowing it intimately and understanding it intimately and the pain that is caused around the world to indigenous communities, of course by colonization where that land was just stolen but then by the sort of exploitation through extractive Industries and so on it's so much in contrast to the concept of Buen Vivir that just seems to capture this idea of of a good life and and developing that in a way that that isn't exploitative that that is actually in harmony with with the planet. You know, we've only have one planet and if we mess up this planet, there is no alternative. There is no Planet B as people say. So I think bringing that kind of indigenous knowledge into the call to action is really important as a really important perspective because it's one of the ways we can see an alternative future for the world. That would be much healthier.
Miguel Garcia: The PHA5 closing ceremony, before the demonstration in the streets of Mar del Plata, we saw a very powerful, intimate, diverse, political and emotional act of the reading of the Call to Action. Take us through what happened there and what were your thoughts while this was going on.
Fran Baum: Oh, well, it was so lovely because the whole assembly I think we're all glad it was the last day. We were looking forward to a March through the streets of Mar del Plata. There were the young people, I think how many young people were those at seven young people were reading, they read through the whole call to action and then people were sort of chanting and when we finally said, you know, do you agree with this? Then the whole room was full of Celebration and I think so many of the people and particularly probably indigenous people were really celebrating in a very colorful way and chanting and singing and it was a very beautiful moment.
Miguel Garcia: What is the world that the Mar del Plata Call To Action envisages?
Fran Baum: I think that the world we envisage is one where I think where there is, Primary I say is the first thing is there is peace. You know at the moment there's so much conflict in the world. I mean Gaza but in Sudan there's a sort of Forgotten conflict where millions of people have been displaced, in Tigray There's been a terrible Civil War in so many and and the other issue that was in terms of violence. Is that the growth of a kind of Narco capitalism with drug drug wars and Drug gangs who are exerting huge violence over communities. So I think peace is absolutely vital but then I think the sense that people can live in solidarity with each other and relationships between people are less exploitative. You know, it's not based on on Doggy Dogg kind of Philosophy, it's actually based on people respecting each other, reciprocity, solidarity and a world where where the difference is in wealth are not are not the sort of obscene levels of different that we have in the moment with people accumulating massive amounts of wealth and doing that through exploitation of people. Um, and and of course, it would be a world free of discrimination whether that's gender, race, class, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, religion, occupations, you know, whatever it would be a world where people were accepted and and people's right to health and their right to live a dignified satisfying life was really realized for everybody, everybody in the world. Not just an elite few who can afford that.
So that I think our vision, and you know, people would be liberated from the sort of colonial and economic structures that we have at the moment and you imagine a sort of flowering of people's, their talents, celebrating their culture, celebrating Arts and Music, and eating healthy food, having access to really good primary health care and good hospital care when they need it, but in a way that's not for profit, you know, in a way that to provide for people's needs on the basis of their needs.
Miguel Garcia: Any final thoughts, hopes for the future, perhaps an invitation
Fran Baum: How well I'd invite people to read the call to action and to discuss it, discuss it with your family with your workplaces, you know, and hopefully if you're an active member of PHM, you'll be discussing it with your comrades within the PHM. But if it's someone listening to this and they're not considering joining us in PHM, but read the document and talk about it. If you don't agree with it, then then have a discussion about why you don't agree with it. But we think it's a document that really sets out a critique of the world if it's red with the background document but also offers a vision for a better world and that's the important thing. I think that it is actually possible to have health for all but we need to change the way that the world is governed and the politics and economics of the world.
Fran Baum: so, do we want to adopt the Call To Action, do we say yes?
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