3 February 2020 – 8 February 2020, WHO Headquarters, Geneva Event website
- The draft provisional agenda of EB 146 and annotated agenda
- EB 146 documentation
- EB members. Benin, Burkina Faso, Eswatini (Swaziland), Gabon, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Argemtina, Brazil, Chile, Grenada, Guyana, USA, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Austria, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Romania, Tajikistan, Djibouti, Iraq, Sudan, Tunisia, UAE, Australia, China, Japan, Singapore, Tonga
IBFAN will be covering several issues at the forthcoming Executive Board Meeting including Maternal Infant and Young Child Nutrition Non State Actors involvement in WHO and WHO’s Framework of Engagement with Non State Actors.
2020 is a reporting year for Infant and Young Child Feeding, so the EB is an opportunity for a Resolution to address new concerns. In addition to the concerns about Coronavirus, the agenda is very full and Member States are often reluctant to have new Resolutions that take up valuable time. Indeed some powerful MS would rather that, after 40 or so years, our issue is taken off the agenda entirely. (See point 1 below)However, there are issues that IBFAN believe need to be addressed, ideally with a draft Resolution. The issues are cross cutting and linked to food systems and strategies that impact negatively on Human Rights to Health, emergencies and climate change:
- Codex and global trade;
- the rise of digital marketing and commercial data collection
- the underlying causes of malnutrition;
- the need for safeguards on products targeting malnourished children;
- the impact multi-stakeholder ‘partnerships’ are having on nutrition policy setting at country level;
- the need for sound conflict of interest policies
- the need to interpret WHO’s exclusive breastfeeding targets carefully
Anyone interested to help please contact me for more information: prundall@babymilkaction.org
- We would welcome as much support as possible for a Resolution on all the above issues. For online marketing we need a simple call to WHO to: collect data on the extent of online social marketing that violates the International Code and subsequent relevant Resolutions and support member states in legislating to end such strategies.
Some things to note:
- At the end of the Director General report on Maternal Infant and Young Child Nutrition is a DECISION that seems to be calling for an END DATE (2026) for future biennial reporting. If this is true – we may be wrong – it would contravene the International Code itself this must be changed. Article 11.7 of the Code states: “The Director-General shall report in even years to the World Health Assembly on the status of implementation of the Code; and shall, on request, provide technical support to Member States preparing national legislation or regulations, or taking other appropriate measures in implementation and furtherance of the principles and aim of this Code.
- The list of WHA Resolutions in the Decision omits the 2002 Resolution: WHA 55.22. This may be an oversight, but this is an important one that specifically calls on Member States (4) to ensure that the introduction of micronutrient interventions and the marketing of nutritional supplements do not replace, or undermine support for the sustainable practice of, exclusive breastfeeding and optimal complementary feeding;
“The WHO Executive Board is composed of 34 members technically qualified in the field of health. Members are elected for three-year terms. The main Board meeting, at which the agenda for the forthcoming Health Assembly is agreed upon and resolutions for forwarding to the Health Assembly are adopted, is held in January, with a second shorter meeting in May, immediately after the Health Assembly, for more administrative matters. The main functions of the Board are to give effect to the decisions and policies of the Health Assembly, to advise it and generally to facilitate its work.” (quoted from WHO website)
The IBFAN team will include Patti Rundall, Alison Linnecar (Convenor of our Climate Change and Contaminants Working Group), and Dr Marina Rea of IBFAN Brazil.
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