Editorial

Advocacy for The Global Alcohol Strategy
The Task for NGOs

Developing and implementing a strong and effective Global Strategy to Reduce the Harmful Use of Alcohol will require more than the dedicated and good work of the World Health Organization, alcohol researchers, and health professionals. It will require sustained advocacy by Member States, health officials, and, importantly, non-governmental organisations and civil society. That advocacy must occur on all political levels: national, regional and global, at least partly as a response - or counterweight - to the enormous resources that alcoholicbeverage industry interests are investing in influencing (and limiting) the content and evolution of the Global Strategy.

Advocacy is necessary to elevate the visibility of alcohol issues among the hierarchy of public health and non-communicable disease issues burdening humankind. Advocacy is necessary to demonstrate support for efforts within WHO for expanded efforts to control alcohol-related harm. It will also be helpful in encouraging potential donor states and/or foundations to provide financial support for global prevention efforts on alcohol, as they have on other pressing global health concerns. More fundamentally and immediately, advocacy is needed to educate World Health Assembly Member States and their delegates about alcohol-related harm prevention policies and the opportunities to enact them. Over time, advocacy can help build on the Global Strategy to create increasingly more powerful regional and global policy mechanisms and understandings to combat the spread of alcohol problems around the globe. A strong global network of NGOs represents the element of advocacy efforts to promote the implementation of global alcoholprevention policies.

What must be done? First, and foremost, NGOs which care about alcohol and health must become better organised on all levels, including the global level. Organisation will require identification of relevant NGOs; consistent inter-group communication; agreement and assertion of specific (and perhaps limited) common (short and longterm) objectives; and the ability to communicate effectively, as a collective voice, with policy makers, health officials, issue specialists, and the media.

Advocacy requires clear goals and objectives, and the creation of strategies to move the alcohol issue forward. In the short term, our mission must be to educate national health leaders - including delegates to the World Health Assembly - and national media about alcohol-related harm prevention issues and what is needed. NGOs concerned about alcohol problems must increase their visibility and advocacy efforts in capitals around the world, strengthening efforts to promote passage of the Global Strategy and assure its robust implementation.

Those efforts would include initiatives to shine media attention on the anti-health interests of alcohol marketers and their many marketing and sales practices that should disqualify them as partners in the development of global policies to reduce alcohol harm. Advocacy must include actions to neutralise - to the extent possible - the influence of alcohol producers and other vested interests on the political process. Advocacy must develop leadership among, and bring together, young people, parents, health and law enforcement professionals, women, and other key constituencies.

These groups and leaders must initiate and develop contacts with national policy makers, and promote the inclusion of technical alcohol experts in country delegations to the World Health Assembly. The generation of communications from “grass roots” representatives (health, social, economic, public safety, and other “influentials”) will also be helpful to secure official and media attention at the national level.

We must also build the NGO presence on alcohol issues in Geneva, in particular before and at the meetings of the Executive Board and the World Health Assembly, where so many important global health issues compete for attention. In part, NGO visibility on the alcohol issue will help balance a massive presence by representatives of numerous alcoholic-beverage interests; it will also encourage Member State mission to focus on global alcohol harm. During the next year, we must collectively work more closely, intensively, and strategically with those Member State missions which support global initiatives to prevent alcohol-related harm and develop a structured means of interaction with WHO operatives responsible for the development and implementation of the Global Strategy to Reduce the Harmful Use of Alcohol.

Additionally, we must reach out to representatives of other national missions in Geneva to explain the alcohol issue and echo messages that health officials and policy makers have received from alcoholrelated harm prevention activists at home. Above all, the global alcohol NGO “movement” must become vocal, visible, and visionary if we are to succeed in strengthening and expanding the global response to alcohol harm.

Although we can continue to operate with the modest resources that GAPA, its members, and others have invested in monitoring and promoting the Global Strategy “process” at the WHO, additional support, wider NGO participation and quasi-permanent Geneva presence would be helpful in upgrading the seriousness and potential successes of our efforts.

Our advocacy efforts need a consistent presence in Geneva to reach out regularly to our allies; broaden our contacts with national mission representatives; communicate up-to-date issue information to NGO participants and their national constituencies and generate timely advocacy on their part; providing on-going consultation to WHO - directly or through member NGOs; and demonstrate critical support for WHO initiatives. WHO might help facilitate this process by recognising an NGO liaison organisation that could fulfill those functions and serve as an established communications conduit to a large, global constituency. Alternatively, WHO could also assist by proving start-up funding or by endorsing funding proposals to other potential sources of financial support.

GAPA’s involvement to date in the evolution of the Global Strategy and its political dynamic suggest that it could be a suitable candidate for such a liaison role.

NGOs must make our voices heard on alcohol issues at the global level. Ultimately, those voices originate at the national level and are concentrated and amplified by organised young people and health and safety activists working at the global level. WHO needs to hear our message, as do WHA members. Establishing a base for those contacts is an essential part of global advocacy for safe and healthy alcohol policies, and an important contribution to WHO’s efforts to reduce alcohol-related harm.

George Hacker
A member of the Board of GAPA Director, Alcohol Policies Project Center for Science in The Public Interest, Washington DC