Reuters Targets WHO Ties to Food and Beverage Companies
A Reuters special report has claimed that the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), a regional office of the World Health Organization (WHO), has accepted “hundreds of thousands of dollars” from food and beverage companies to combat obesity. According to journalists Duff Wilson and Adam Kerlin, WHO and five of its regional offices already prohibit industry funding, but PAHO—“founded 46 years before it was affiliated with WHO in 1948—had different standards allowing the business donations.” In particular, the report cites contributions from Nestlé and Unilever as evidence that PAHO and other WHO entities are partnering with industry out of necessity since the international agency “cut its own funding for chronic disease by 20 percent since 2010—an even bigger decline than for the agency as a whole.”
“The recent infusion of corporate cash is the most pointed example to date
of how WHO is approaching its battle against chronic disease. Increasingly,
it is relying on what it calls ‘partnerships’ with industry, opting to enter into
alliances with food and beverage companies rather than maintain strict
neutrality,” write Wilson and Kerlin. “The strategy differs dramatically from
WHO’s approach to interacting with the tobacco industry—companies with
which it is unwilling to partner.”
The Reuters report also faults WHO for purportedly failing to maintain
adequate conflict-of-interest policies, pointing to experts on its Nutrition
Guidance Expert Advisory Group with alleged financial ties to food and
beverage companies. “Industry is buzzing all around,” said Boyd Swinburn,
director of WHO’s Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention in Melbourne,
Australia. “Even in things like nutrition guidelines, they’re usually in the room
at the policymaking table or buzzing around it and putting all sort of pressure
on, bringing their huge conflicts of interest and their huge resources to it—
and we’re wondering why we don’t get much public interest policy coming
out.” See Reuters, October 19, 2012.
