Interview with Evo Morales, President of Bolivia
ROME, Nov 3 2007 (IPS) – Bolivian President Evo Morales visited Italy this week to receive a special award for his government #39s commitment to social and health issues. He has made these issues a political priority.
President Evo Morales Credit: ABI (Agencia de Informacion Boliviana)
The award was presented by the Pio Manzù Centre, a research organisation based in Rimini in northeast Italy that studies economic, scientific and social policies.
Besides meetings with Italian President Giorgio Napolitano and foreign affairs minister Massimo D #39Alema, Morales met members of the 30,000 Bolivian community in Rome, and members of Italian social movements.
Morales told Rome #39s Bolivians that before he was elected President in December 2005, Bolivia received 300 million dollars a year in tax revenues from the oil industry. Following nationalisation of energy reserves, Bolivia now receives 2 billion dollars annually.
The increased revenues are being used for education and healthcare, and for creation of a microcredit programme, Morales says.
To increase revenues there is no need to create additional taxes, he told Claudia Diez de Medina from IPS, but simply to make better use of our natural resources. For this, he said, we need partners, not masters.
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Some excerpts from the interview put together by IPS Italy correspondent Sabina Zaccaro:
IPS: You have been awarded by an Italian organisation this week for your government #39s programmes for better access to health and nutrition, focusing on children particularly. Could you give us some details of these steps?
Evo Morales: Our challenge is to work for all Bolivians without prioritising any sector, but my first obligation is to the people in need; these are the children, the old, the poor. Talking about children, we are also implementing a policy called #39Zero Malnutrition #39 (Hambre Zero) to attend to the issue of health for children.
Our next step will focus on nutrition; we are implementing a project on dairy processing plants this year for milk and yogurt. I have suggested and hope it will have good results to make yogurt with quinoa (a crop growing in the Andean region of South America acclaimed for its protein content).
We are going to train mayors to buy these products and give them to children in their school meals; instead of buying cookies from Argentina, from other countries, why not use what we have.
We have also identified three processing plants for orange juice in different regions that will combine milk and juices. Children will have these for free with their school lunch. I have other plans but they need further development.
We aim to give our children a quarter or half litre of milk per day. We already have machinery ready for this, and we will soon receive other processing plants, including those for citrus fruits.
IPS: Your government has teamed up with Cuba to strengthen health services as well
EM: We are strengthening access to health all over the country. This year we have so far 40 hospitals of #39second level #39 (de Segundo nuivel), and 11 ophthalmology centres donated by Cuba. They have undertaken from 100,000 to 150,000 eye operations. The hospitals have also treated a huge majority of the 380,000 Bolivians affected by the floods in February.
IPS: What is the outcome of these policies?
EM: In Bolivia eye surgery costs usually around 1,000 dollars, and in Europe I have been told around 3,000 to 4,000 dollars. Imagine how much money we have saved to Bolivian people, and with good results. Not only to the poor, but colonels, generals, lawyers, middle class people.
IPS: According to the U.N., almost 40 countries in the world have adopted definite laws against domestic violence and for protection of women. Thirteen of them are Latin American, Bolivia among them. But a patriarchal society still restrains women #39s emancipation. What are your policies here?