WHO has published a new report which showcases the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Republic of Moldova, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – as pioneers in implementing the most cost-effective policies to reduce alcohol intake and alcohol-attributable harm in the WHO European Region.
The report, “Implementing alcohol policies in the Commonwealth of Independent States – a workshop of ‘first-mover’ countries”, recognizes the crucial contributions of some of these countries in reaching the Global Monitoring Framework target for noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) of an overall 10% reduction in the harmful use of alcohol by 2025 at the regional level.
Best-buy policies
WHO recommends a series of so-called best-buy policy responses that aim to reduce the huge alcohol-attributable burden that many of the CIS countries, especially countries in eastern Europe, have experienced historically and continue to experience today.
The policies include:
- increasing alcohol excise taxes
- restricting alcohol advertising
- restricting physical availability of retailed alcohol.
Overall per capita alcohol consumption decreased in the entire Region between 2010 and 2016. This success is a direct result of decreased consumption in various eastern European and central Asian countries, most of which have introduced cost-effective alcohol control policies in recent years.
“The CIS countries are the ‘first movers’ in implementing certain alcohol policies, such as minimum pricing of alcohol or total alcohol marketing bans in the WHO European Region,” said Nino Berdzuli, Director of the Division of Country Health Programmes.
“Many of these countries adopted best buys – measures that have been recommended as cost-effective by WHO for many years. Given that these countries have the experience of real-life implementation of these policies and can share that with other Members States across the Region, we now need to improve documentation and analysis of the impacts to sort out which implementation models are most effective and what enforcement mechanisms are required,” she concluded.
Documenting success stories and lessons learned
The new report summarizes discussions from the first WHO workshop on the implementation of alcohol policies in the CIS countries, which took place on 4–5 December 2019 in Moscow, Russian Federation. It documents CIS countries’ successes and challenges in pricing policies, alcohol marketing and labelling; how they monitored progress; and how they dealt with the problem of unrecorded alcohol (alcohol that is not accounted for in official statistics because it is outside of formal channels of governmental control, such as homemade, illicit or surrogate alcohol).
The report provides invaluable insights from real-life scenarios and natural experiments through the voices of the policy-makers and public health specialists behind the respective policy interventions.
A new alcohol policy network
The report marks the start of a WHO initiative which sets up a new alcohol policy platform for the exchange of knowledge and best practices among CIS countries and beyond. It is hoped that the experience of these “first-mover” countries can inspire similar action in other countries of the Region, bringing down levels of alcohol consumption and related harm more widely.
“CIS countries are similar to each other in the way that their health-care systems are set up; therefore, it is important to have an alcohol policy network that can support ministries of health and other authorities in their efforts to sensitize policy-makers to public health measures that can reduce the immense economic and health burden caused by alcohol,” explained Carina Ferreira-Borges, Programme Manager for Alcohol and Illicit Drugs at the WHO European Office for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases.
“Many policy actions require commitment from other ministries as well, so as to take effective action to reduce economic and health costs and the associated human tragedies caused by alcohol,” she added.
Understanding the implementation of alcohol control policies by CIS countries and the impacts these efforts have had moves forward the vision set out in WHO’s European Programme of Work for 2020–2025 to protect the vulnerable, leave no one behind, and enable people to live safer, healthier and better lifestyles.