European Alcohol and Health Forum

4th meeting, wednesday 11th march 2009 - Brussels

61 people attending, plus DG SANCO.

Michael Huebel presented, within the Youth Task Force, the Clearing House, which basically will be an inventory of good practices, available on line, with toolkits that will allow other organizations to implement same projects in other areas, in other words, it will be intended for small organizations to show what they are doing, hoping that other small organizations will take up some of it to replicate at local level. In the data base it will be important to underline practical aspects, such as reducing drink and drive by youngsters, or how drink and drive is being tackled.

It has been proposed to change its name (Clearing House is too commercial), and to adopt a logo, so that it can be officially introduced at the Open Forum on 30th april.

Now the Advisory Group for the Clearing House needs to be set up, it will consist of a few Forum members, some from the Committee on National Alcohol Policy and Action (Member States) and some from the Science Group. This could be done by application, so we should decide if we want to be in or not. Thereafter the Advisory Group will discuss the criteria. Having produced this result, the Youth Task Force is approaching an end.

Task Force on Marketing communication: Robert Madelin said Diageo has produced a study showing that 60% of young people aged 18 to 25 have an irresponsible behaviour towards drinking. But: WHAT DOES IRRESPONSIBLE MEAN ?  Maybe because they only drink water ? Surely something must be done to fix the bad image of youth (usually good news don’t make the headlines). Analysis of this Task Force is still focused on self regulation and social marketing (to me, a waste of time).

 Eurocommerce has proposed to educate the youngsters, for this purpose the Forum may decide to set up a new Task Force. I have suggested that a family approach would have better results. Others were also skeptical, and anyway it is difficult to draw a line to define the target. If any of us has any project in this particular field, that proved effective, we can always put it in the database of the Clearing House. Maybe the school should be rethinked to tackle also this problem. Also labelling could be more effective, and requiring less resources. And in any case educating is not the task of Industry, but of the society. In the november Forum we should decide who should be doing what, in a more pro-active way.

 Committee on Data Collection, Indicators and Definitions (consisting of Commission Services, WHO, ESPAD and others). Interestingly, it has adopted the WHO terminology (i.e. hazardous and harmful drinking, alcohol consumption), and not the Industry terminology (irresponsible drinking, abuse). Among others, have redefined some concepts:

·         Binge drinking: defined as 60 gr. or more in one occasion, monthly or more often, in the last 12 months .

·         Harm: alcohol-attributable Years of Life Lost (YLLs).

 Rand Europe presented the Study over Affordability of alcohol beverages in Europe, commissioned by DG SANCO. Rand focused on summarising current understanding (represented by a very significant body of robust findings) and providing additional analysis to the European situation that can help inform decision-making around the pricing of alcoholic beverages.

Very briefly, it has been found that affordability is a function of relative price and disposable income. Affordability has increased all over Europe in the last 10 years, except Italy. It has been found that affordability is indeed correlated to alcohol consumption, which in turn is correlated with the incidence of certain types of harm. In particular, 1% increase in affordability is associated with 0.22% increase in alcohol consumption on short term and 0.32% on long term. At the same time, 1% increase in alcohol consumption is associated with 0.86% increase in fatal traffic accidents, 0.62% increase in traffic injuries and 0.37% increase in chronic liver cyrrhosis. So we can say that pricing policies can be effective in reducing alcohol harm, although they are not widely used to reduce harm in the EU. They may not be sufficient on their own, as a real policy should be a mix of several effective policies (alcohol problems are  multi-factorial).

Industry has tried to minimize the results, stating that statistical significance is modest, and if we wanted to reduce overall consumption by 10% we should increase the prices by 50% which would be very unpopular.

Comments in writing about policies issues in connection with this study are invited by mail to the Commission within friday 20th march.

Reporting from the Science Group on impact of marketing communication on volume and patterns of alcohol consumption, especially by young people, by Ian Gilmore (head of Group) and Peter Anderson (head of smaller group that produced the review). The study was commissioned by DG SANCO to look in more depth at the diverging points of view on the relationship between marketing and consumption. The review found that several existing studies do have methodological differences, and not all of them found that there is indeed an impact of alcohol marketing on consumption. In the end the group has decided to focus on 13 longitudinal studies (i.e. where one can identify cause and effect). There is consistent evidence to demonstrate an impact of alcohol advertising on the uptake of drinking among non-drinking young people, and increased consumption among their drinking peers.

The results are corroborated by the findings of the other methodologies, including qualitative, econometric, cross-sectional and experimental studies.

Among other things, parental guidance proved to be effective in reducing desirability of alcohol, in reducing its positive expectations and reducing final alcohol consumption, even though it did not prove capable of entirely reversing the impact of marketing on youth. So my comment is once more "family approach".

The reason why marketing has a particular impact on young people has to do with the rewarding system.

These conclusions have been again attacked by the industry, which claims that other studies show little or no marketing impact on consumption. But in the working group there were scientists representing the industry and the discussion should have taken place at that level, not during the plenary session.

Madelin pointed out that, for instance, Diageo is spending millions in social marketing, trusting that it will change behaviour of the youngsters, therefore, on the same basis, the findings of the Science Group on marketing cannot be rejected as non conclusive. The Forum asked for an opinion, and as long as it matches the mandate, we accept the answer.

 Reporting on commitments by all the Forum members has a great importance to prepare the Open Forum on the 30th april. The reporting procedure has been simplified and is web based. The new form was circulated on 2nd march. Next few days we will be getting an email with the access code and user guidance. Reporting must be completed by the 27th of march. Better if we show that our commitment is "active". It will be important that EMNA commitment has a place in the Commission's database.

Next Forum will be on 12th november. By then we will have the new Government of Europe, the new Health Commissioner etc. hoping they will continue to support the European Strategy and the Forum. And by then the respective organizations must go more practical, on how to progress and how to shape the future policies.

Ennio Palmesino

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