AIDS: the facts • AIDS kills more than 5,000 people every day in Southern Africa • By 2005, AIDS is expected to claim the lives of between 8 per cent and 25 per cent of today's practising doctors in Southern Africa. • 36 per cent of Botswana's 1.6 million people are infected. • Life expectancy in Zimbabwe has fallen from 56 in the early 70s to 33.l today • 54 countries saw average income decline in 1990s. • The wealthiest 5 per cent of the world's people now earn |14 times as much as the poorest 5 per cent. Julia Brandreth
These are terrifying facts. Poverty Poverty prevents poor countries from tackling HIV. The more people are infected, the harder it becomes to provide treatment and to prevent future infecTons.
As infection and death rates rise, productivity falls and countries find it more and more difficult to tackle poverty. In a situation of deepening inequality between "rich" and "poor" nations, external funding is the only way to tackle the crisis. This is the logic of global capitalism.
In 200l, in response to the AIDS crisis, the G8 agreed to support The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Unlike much other aid money, support from the Global Fund is not dependent on applicant countries signing up to economic policy 'conditions' set by funders. The Fund has been praised for allowing people in developing countries to determine their own priorities.
When the Fund was first launched, campaigners were concerned that much of the money intended to save lives would go into the pockets of the multinational pharmaceutical companies that hold patents on essential medicines.
However, under pressure from campaigners, rich-country governments have accepted the principle that poor countries applying to the Global Fund need not buy patented medicines. In the short term, this has meant that more people can be treated. In the longer run, prices should continue to go down. Médecins Sans Frontières has high quality triple-therapy anti-retroviral drugs, which currently cost around $300, will eventually fall below $60. Challenge for the G8
Whilst incapable of solving the global HIV crisis, the Fund has been a step forward. However, it is now in crisis due to the intransigence of the world's richest coun tries.
Far from meeting UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's estimate that an additional $710 billion each year is needed to fight AIDS alone, the Fund has allocated just a little over $3.5 billion for the next five years, less than 10 per cent of what's needed. If the long-term future of the fund isn't secured people who have moved onto life-saving anti-retroviral treatments will die.
Action for South Africa (ACTSA) believe the G8 need to move away from voluntary donations and commit to annual, duesbased contributions to the Global Fund. This should be based on the Equitable Contributions Framework, which establishes each country's contribution based on its share of global wealth (measured by gross domestic product).
In January 2003, President Bush announced a new AIDS initiative. Grassroots pressure in the US ensured that, by May 2003, he signed a bill which will potentially increase the US contribution to the Fund to $I billion a year.
This funding is conditional upon the US providing no more than one third of the AIDS comes as an extra devastating blow to young and old already living in poverty predicted that prices for a year's supply of Global Fund's total funds. In response, at June's G8 Summit, European leaders claimed that they would match America's billion dollars. However, both sides seem more concerned with one-upmanship than with saving lives.
ACTSA, in a joint campaign with the Trade Union Congress (TUC), is lobbying the British government to take a lead in its contributions to the Fund. France has tripled its contribution to the Global Fund to $177 million a year. This is more than four times the UK commitment, though the two countries have very similar sized economies
In May Britain announced a further $80 million contribution to the Global Fund. However, this money will come from existing aid budgets and will be in 2 instalments paid in 2006 and 2007. Even then it will represent a cut in the UK's annual donations. In fact, by 2006, the UK should be aiming to provide ten times this amount. Partial Solutions
Beyond the hypocrisy of the unseemly scramble for moral high ground and to be seen as the true friend of Africa' between the US and Europe, wider questions have to be posed. Whilst the autonomy granted to African countries by the Global Fund is welcome, any 'aid' must be put in the context Professor of Sociology at the LSE, highlights the successes of global south countries in introducing the notion of options to override patents on pharmaceuticals but goes on to describe the 'horsetrading' that has gone on since.
The WTO came up with a list of 'approved diseases' that justify overriding patents, which excludes "all major diseases on