Why Disease Prevention Is Becoming a Fiscal Strategy, Not Just a Health Policy

A new FAO Investment Centre brief developed with WHO and the World Organisation for Animal Health argues that preventing zoonotic disease, antimicrobial resistance and other health threats requires coordinated investment across human, animal and environmental systems. The economic case is increasingly hard to ignore: infectious diseases already impose major costs, while World Bank estimates cited in the brief suggest antimicrobial resistance alone could reduce global GDP by about 3.8% by 2050.

The economic case for preventing disease is becoming harder for governments to separate from the public-health case. Zoonotic outbreaks, antimicrobial resistance and other infectious threats can disrupt farms, overwhelm health systems, damage livelihoods and leave losses that persist long after an emergency itself has passed. World Bank estimates cited by FAO suggest antimicrobial resistance alone could reduce global GDP by around 3.8% by 2050.

A new brief from the FAO Investment Centre, developed with the World Health Organization and the World Organisation for Animal Health, argues for treating these risks through One Health: an approach connecting human, animal and environmental health. The challenge now is moving that idea from international recognition into investment decisions that ministries, development institutions and other financiers can justify and sustain.

Prevention Has a Visibility Problem, Outbreaks Do Not

Governments rarely need convincing that a major outbreak is expensive once hospitals are under pressure, livestock are affected or food production is disrupted. The harder budgetary decision comes earlier, when spending must be committed to surveillance, veterinary services, environmental protection and other preventive systems before the crisis materializes.

It creates an inherent financing problem. Prevention can generate value precisely by stopping losses from occurring, but avoided costs are less visible than emergency expenditures. Investments that prevent infections, reduce disease burdens or slow antimicrobial resistance therefore have to compete with programmes whose benefits may be easier to quantify immediately.

One Health attempts to strengthen that preventive logic by recognizing that health threats frequently cross institutional boundaries. Infections can move between animals and people, while changing ecosystems, environmental degradation, food systems and human activity can affect the conditions in which diseases emerge and spread.

Economically, if risks are connected, spending separately on public health, animal health and environmental protection may miss opportunities to address threats earlier and more efficiently. Coordinated investment creates the possibility that one intervention can produce benefits across several sectors instead of responding to each consequence independently.

Animal Health May Be One of the Cheapest Places to Stop a Bigger Crisis

Stronger veterinary services and animal disease surveillance can identify threats closer to their source, creating an opportunity to act before they develop into wider public-health and economic emergencies.

Baba Soumare, Deputy Director General of the World Organisation for Animal Health, identifies animal health as an especially effective entry point for prevention. Strong veterinary systems, surveillance and cooperation across sectors can protect animals while also supporting human health, ecosystems and economic resilience.

This changes the way veterinary spending can be understood. Rather than viewing it only as support for livestock production, governments can also consider its value in protecting food systems, reducing the risk of wider disease transmission and avoiding economic disruption that extends well beyond agriculture.

The argument becomes more important as climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, food insecurity and socioeconomic vulnerability add new layers of complexity. These pressures do not operate in isolation, making fragmented responses increasingly difficult when the risks themselves move across environmental, agricultural and public-health systems.

One Health Has Won Recognition. It Has Not Yet Won the Investment Case

One Health has gained international recognition, yet investment in programmes built around the approach remains limited. The next challenge is to demonstrate the financial returns strongly enough for prevention to compete against other demands on public and development budgets, which means translating health benefits into economic measures that finance ministries and investors can compare. Estimates of avoided medical expenditure, productivity losses, livestock damage and other costs could make preventive programmes easier to assess alongside infrastructure, social spending and other development priorities.

Mohamed Manssouri, Assistant Director-General and Director of the FAO Investment Centre, has emphasized the need for stronger quantitative evidence and greater support for governments seeking to turn One Health priorities into investable programmes. WHO Assistant Director-General Dr Jeremy Farrar has similarly stressed the importance of evidence on impact and return on investment.

The gap matters because a compelling public-health rationale does not automatically produce a compelling financing proposition. Decision-makers still need to know which interventions offer the greatest value, over what time horizon, who captures the benefits and which institution should pay when returns are spread across several sectors.

The Real Test Is Whether Governments Can Finance What No Single Ministry Owns

One Health exposes a structural weakness in conventional budgeting: risks can be shared even when budgets are not. Health ministries, veterinary authorities, environmental agencies and food-system institutions may all confront different parts of the same threat while operating through separate mandates, funding streams and accountability structures.

Scaling prevention therefore requires more than individual projects. Long-term financing mechanisms and institutional arrangements must support interventions ranging from community programmes to national and global initiatives, while governments need ways to coordinate responsibilities and spending across agencies that have traditionally operated separately.

This is where the One Health agenda moves from technical cooperation into economic governance. The question is not simply whether agencies can share information, but whether governments can structure budgets around risks whose costs and benefits are distributed across multiple sectors.

The next phase will depend heavily on evidence. Governments and financing institutions will need clearer comparisons of interventions, stronger estimates of avoided losses and practical models for sustaining preventive spending over time. Without that, One Health risks remaining widely endorsed but persistently underfunded.

For countries facing overlapping disease, climate and environmental risks, however, the direction of the argument is becoming clearer. Prevention is not only about avoiding a health emergency; it is also about protecting livelihoods, food production, public finances and economic stability before those systems are forced to absorb the cost of failure.