Speech on alcohol at the Informal Meeting of the Ministers for Employment, Social Policy, Health and Consumer Affairs
Mr President, Minister Belēvičs, thank you for giving me the floor.
Let me congratulate the Latvian EU [European Union] presidency on organizing several successful events – including the conference on multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, the intersectoral conference on healthy lifestyles in school settings, the chief medical and chief nursing officers meeting and the World Health Day event – and also for putting two important topics on the agenda of this informal council: alcohol and nutrition.
With regard to alcohol, it is indeed important to explore the possibility of developing a new EU alcohol strategy to replace the one from 2006. The paper produced for this meeting provides a very good summary of the many activities that have taken place during the last nine years.
We should not forget that the European Region has the highest adult alcohol consumption of all the WHO regions, at almost double the world average. For the period 2008–2010, the average annual European adult per capita consumption was 10.9 litres of pure alcohol. The good news is that since 2003–2005 annual per capita consumption has declined by approximately 2% per year. Some of this reduction may be a result of the financial crisis, but the efforts of Member States with support and guidance from the EU and WHO should not be underestimated.
As you know, WHO has developed several policy instruments to guide Member States in reducing the harmful use of alcohol – notably the global strategy and the European action plan to implement the global strategy, both of which were adopted by all Member States. Should you so decide, WHO would strongly support a new EU strategy to complement WHO policy tools. An EU alcohol strategy gives added value, in particular on cross-border issues, and includes mechanisms to influence:
- prices (including alcohol taxation);
- definitions of alcoholic beverages;
- alcohol marketing and advertising, particularly young people's exposure to marketing/advertising, including cross-border and online advertising;
- the labelling of alcoholic beverages with health-related information;
- cross-border sales of alcoholic beverages, including online sales.
The adoption of the EU alcohol strategy in 2006 resulted in close collaboration between the EC [European Commission] and WHO. Alcohol is one of the main risk factors for the disease burden in Europe, and the EC and WHO have been able to join forces, especially on monitoring and reporting. Together with the EC, WHO has established an information system on alcohol and health with more than 200 indicators on consumption, harm and policy responses in Member States. Cost sharing has helped WHO to improve the system over the years. A common information system also decreases the pressure on Member States, as they now only have to provide data on alcohol to one source.
WHO hopes that the EC will continue to have a strong focus on alcohol policy, including pricing and marketing guidelines. There is a need to adopt cross-border strategies as Member States face difficulties in introducing such policies alone. Higher minimum pricing of alcohol products is needed in order to reduce consumption and cross-border shopping. WHO is eager to continue its collaboration with the EC and to develop further the alcohol databases and regular reporting.
WHO was involved in collecting the information used to evaluate the EU alcohol strategy, and at the moment is working to ensure that the best indicators are selected to monitor the EU action plan on youth drinking and on heavy episodic drinking 2014–2016. WHO has agreed to evaluate this action plan, and soon hopes to be able to sign a new agreement with the Commission.
Thank you.
