Table of Contents

Statement for Integrated Approaches to Public Health, the Environment, and Development on the occasion of the Peru Conference and Signing Event, by Janine Selendy.

read at the Conference by Raul Farfan

On this auspicious occasion, I extend warm greetings and sincere thanks to Roberto Ugas and all the dedicated members of the Universidad Agraria community who have made it possible for HORIZON International to make the university its primary base of operation for its work in Peru and the surrounding countries. We welcome with the greatest appreciation the opportunity to work together with the university faculty and students to advance HORIZON's mission to work to improve conditions in the world. We take pride and have the deepest appreciation for the work of Raul Farfan, Walter Castro, and all of HORIZON's other dedicated Interns whose achievements to date lend great promise to what they and other HORIZON Associates will accomplish.

We need to help bring about international stability through a reduction in socio-economic strife, reduction of misery and suffering and improvement in the lives of all people so there is no one who lives and dies without the ability to enjoy life.

We need to work together with people from all countries of the world in a cooperative effort to alleviate poverty, provide education for all and economic security built on strengths and resources in keeping with regional accessibility and cultural and traditional interests, and to improve health conditions, especially by reducing the incidence of malaria, TB, HIV/AIDS, and by alleviating malnourishment.

We need to work together with people in every country to find, encourage, and develop solutions to prevailing problems and to make generally available the knowledge of those solutions so that the solutions may be economically replicated wherever they may be necessary or useful.

We need to work with people in communities, regions and countries to build on existing capacities through a sustainable livelihoods approach, that is, by carefully and thoroughly ascertaining existing strengths within communities, regions and countries including infrastructure and natural resources, and talents and abilities, from talents of doctors and carpenters to textile workers, potters and farmers.

We look to advance these objectives in part by building on HORIZON's and others' case studies of proven solutions for replication in whole or in part, as HORIZON now does on the HORIZON Solutions Site. We need to encourage development of new ideas with input from all countries and we need to help expand and refine proven successful initiatives and new ideas through a combination of field work and academic input and by sharing and further developing that knowledge in major workshops and conferences, such as this one, which can yield results to provide a framework for securing funding and other forms of support.

And, we need to continually spread knowledge of successful initiatives and build on that knowledge.

What HORIZON hopes to achieve, and what I am calling upon you and others to join us to work toward, is not an impossible dream, but a dream we can make a reality.

Today's conference and workshops on bringing together as it does representatives of government, UN agencies, non-government organizations, and members of the academic community exemplifies the way in which we can work together to build on successful endeavors and ensure that the knowledge of what has proven successful will not be lost, but be used to bring about similar initiatives and to foster new ones. The little we can each do will be magnified many fold as we together seek to make this a happier, healthier world for all. I thank every one of you for your participation and for being together for this important occasion. I wish I could have been with you in person, but I am surely with you in spirit.

(c) HORIZON INTERNATIONAL 2001