Paul Farmer, the founder of Partners In Health, a global humanitarian organization, spoke about the need for "pro-poor" international policy at the opening of the renovated Heller-Brown building at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management last Thursday morning. Farmer, an infectious disease expert, Harvard Medical School professor, anthropologist and author of four books, has opened and run hospitals in Haiti, Peru, Russia and Rwanda to treat patients suffering from AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, among other illnesses.

He challenged "the state religion of public policy," which, he said, cowers from alleviating the suffering of the poor in the modern world. For years, Farmer said policymakers told him it wasn't "cost-effective" or "sustainable" to confront AIDS and other infectious diseases in the third world. Economists, namely, argued that it would be too expensive to fund treatment drugs.

"I learned that these conversations are not meant to start a conversation, but meant to end it," Farmer said.

Instead, Farmer said he decided to "leave the policy community behind" until they caught up with him.

In 2002, the new Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria gave Partners In Health a major grant to build Zanmi Lasante (Partners In Health in Haitian Creole), a health clinic in Haiti, and train and pay local community workers to help run the clinic and care for patients.

"We have built up a system in Haiti that is robust and pro-poor," he said.

Farmer urged the students, professors and donors in the audience to focus on global health equity and develop "pro-poor policies" in their research.

"We don't have a good plan as a research and teaching community," he said. "We've got to learn how to link our teaching and research to service."

Partners In Health's new policy, Farmer said, is to focus on strengthening the public sector.

"[In] all of these places we have gone into the public sector and built infrastructure and public sector facilities owned by the people of Haiti," he said.

Farmer's work isn't just about treating illness; he said funding for clinics also creates jobs, advocates for clean water and encourages primary education. "Haitians use money to do water projects, to organize patient groups, food and agricultural intiatives," he said.

Farmer displayed several maps showing the prevalence of AIDS in Africa, the number of physicians there, and before and after photos of now-recovering patients. One from Rwanda, he noted, looked near death and now needs to worry about his expanding gut.

"He went from looking skeletol to looking like he needs lipitor," he said jokingly.

Farmer also realized clinics must have a local name, despite the pronunciation problems that might occur for English-speakers. If everything were named Partners In Health, that would be a form of "anthropological machismo," he said. That is why his Rwandan clinic is called Inshuti Mu Buzima (Partners In Health in the Rwandan national language, Kinyarwanda).

Farmer's organization has brought its successful strategies back to Boston. "All we're trying to do is raise the Harvard level of care to the Haiti level," he said jokingly.

During a question-and-answer session, Farmer discussed why policy makers avoid pro-poor policy.

"People want to talk about sustainability, but they don't want to talk about history," he said. "It's as if poverty arose de novo from the earth. They want to erase history. Erasing history is the oldest trick in the book for policy people."

What we need to sustain, Farmer said, is "our willingness to fight for what's right."

Thomas Glynn, Ph.D. '77, chair of Heller's Board of Overseers and chief operating officer of PIH, introduced Farmer, characterizing his life and work as "audacious."

As first-years, the Class of 2008 read Tracy Kidder's 2003 biography of Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World for its new-student forum.

Undergraduates watched the speech through a live video in the Shapiro Campus Center Theater due to space limitations in the Schneider Building, where the event was held.