Excellencies,
Colleagues and friends,
On behalf of the Secretariat of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC), and as co-sponsor of this meeting, I warmly welcome all of you to this event during the 77th session of the UN General Assembly.
This is not an easy time for our world. We are still experiencing the effects of the terrible COVID-19 pandemic, while inflation is rising fast and national debts are growing. It will be hard to raise resources when governments are focused on the immediate needs of their peoples.
For those of us fighting against noncommunicable diseases, in pursuit of the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and especially Goal 3 which requires us to reduce premature mortality from NCDs by a third by 2030, it is a challenge to make the case for investment and to ask everyone to focus on what might look like a long-term issue.
The good news is that we have volumes of evidence to show the damage done by NCDs — both to individual humans and to wider society — and to show the extraordinary benefits of government action.
For example:
A 2020 WHO report showed that investing $1 in NCD prevention and control measures in low- and middle-income countries showed a return of $7. More importantly, this investment would prevent close to 7 million NCD deaths by 2030.
In 2012, smoking alone accounted for 5.6% of global healthcare spending. Add in productivity losses, and the total economic cost of smoking was equivalent to 1.8% of global gross domestic product, with 40 percent of costs falling on the developing world.
Money matters. Tobacco control, the entire purpose of the WHO FCTC and its protocol, needs funding to deliver life-saving results. This is why, in 2021, our governing bodies authorised the creation of Investment Funds, managed by the World Bank, to complement the existing funding for tobacco control.
This will aid our efforts to assist a central element of the NCD issue — tobacco kills 14 percent of all the over-30s dying from NCDs, about one death in seven.
Our NCD partners have also launched a new fund and I’m delighted to welcome the Health4Life fund which will make grants to expand access to treatment and strengthen prevention in support of SDG 3.4.
We must also remember self-sustaining financial tools, as requested in the 2015 Addis Ababa Action Agenda — for example simple levies like tobacco taxes, which deter consumption and help fund the development agenda, including NCD-related costs.
Challenging the industry responsible for this human-manufactured pandemic — an industry that kills at least 8 million people a year — is central to our work. Given its history, it’s also predictable that the industry will keep working hard to undermine the implementation of the WHO FCTC and to keep consumers hooked. That’s why Article 5.3 of the Convention, which protects public health policies from interference from the industry and other vested interests, is so important, and why we regularly remind Parties of their obligations in this matter. The tobacco industry cannot — should not — participate in any step of the policy decision making process.
There are enormous challenges ahead and much work to do. But we have the tools to do the job, and together we will make progress on these critical life-saving efforts.
Thank you.
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