Dear colleagues,
It's my pleasure to be once more in the beautiful city of Montevideo. I first came here a long time ago, at a time when tobacco use was a huge problem in this country: in those days, people smoked everywhere, advertising, promotion and sponsorship of tobacco products was perfectly normal and cigarette packs didn’t even carry health warnings. It was a time when Uruguay was beginning to take the first steps towards change, towards the success story we see in this country today. I can still recall the image of Dr. Helmut Karsdorf, that pioneering Uruguayan physician, spreading the message that tobacco damaged people’s health, urging his patients to heed his warnings and pressing the government to act on this public health agenda.
Nowadays, while there is still much to be done, Uruguay can teach us more than it can learn. Success can be seen through the decline in smoking prevalence, but there are also less obvious signals, like the efforts of the tobacco industry here in Uruguay to disrupt implementation of measures contained in the WHO FCTC. This provides real proof that this country is on the right track. In addition, you have made significant efforts to share your experience and best practices with others by establishing a WHO FCTC Knowledge Hub, providing us with the perfect venue to convene this first meeting of the Convention Secretariat, in partnership with the United Nations Development Program, to address South-South and Triangular cooperation and to ensure a deeper and better engagement. We could not be more thankful that you, Uruguay, are hosting this meeting.
Thank you also to UNDP, WHO and those intergovernmental organizations which have been fully engaged in the preparations for this meeting. Thank you to all Parties who have seen this approach as a means to advance the implementation of the treaty. Thank you also to our dear observers, the non-governmental organizations accredited to COP, who have been crucial in strengthening efforts for a tobacco-free world.
This is really a ground-breaking effort to bring together in one room both potential providers and recipients to discuss and engage in implementation projects. It’s an important exercise to secure assistance for the South-South and Triangular cooperation initiative.
The Convention Secretariat has engaged very intensively in this exercise, as mandated by the WHO FCTC Conference of the Parties. I can tell you that we took a risk with this, to discover whether Parties to the treaty would be in a position to join preliminary discussions on cooperation. Now here we are, sitting together in exploratory efforts to discover what’s on offer from one side, in terms of resources and availability, and what’s needed from the other side - getting to know how Parties want to be supported.
Added to that we have designated knowledge hubs - such as the International Center in Uruguay - that will join this effort.
With the adoption of the post-2015 agenda and the financing for development approach calling for ODA (official development assistance) mechanisms to prioritize the implementation of the treaty, we have good momentum to explore new and potentially improved mechanisms to strengthen the treaty.
I am thrilled by the huge potential of this group and the opportunity to synthesize hard-won knowledge from our past meetings. On the one hand, we have a clear understanding of what might be wanted from the joint Needs Assessment missions that were conducted with many of you, and on the other hand we have identified a number of champions for the implementation of particular treaty provisions. More important still, we have a common commitment from all for the implementation of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control for the benefit of humankind.
Together, we are stronger, we can make it.