Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, May 16 2005 (IPS) — As the 191-member U.N. General Assembly gets ready for a high-level meeting on HIV/AIDS early next month, activists and senior U.N. officials say the global fight against the deadly disease is being jeopardised by a shortage of funds.

”There’s an urgent crisis at the global level and it is a crisis of funding,” said Paul Zeitz, executive director of the Washington-based Global AIDS Alliance.

”As costs go up and as more people get infected and more people get medically eligible for treatment, the estimated needs are expected to rise,” Zeitz told IPS.

The U.N. meeting, which is scheduled to take place Jun. 2-3, will review progress made so far and focus on the successes and failures of the ongoing battle against HIV/AIDS.

Last month, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned of a ”continued gap between funding needs and available resources at both the international and national levels.”

UNAIDS, the joint U.N. agency spearheading the fight, has estimated that approximately 12 billion dollars will have to be spent annually from this year, rising to 20 billion dollars by 2007.

Global spending against AIDS rose from 2.1 billion dollars in 2001 to 6.1 billion dollars in 2004. But the shortfall in 2005 would be in the region of 6.0 billion dollars since funding is expected to remain stagnant or increase only marginally.

Stephen Lewis, the U.N. special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, said the shortfall threatens to derail the fight against AIDS.

”It’s such an obscenity and a mortifying international indignity that we should be struggling for relatively small amounts of money to save the lives of millions of people when we are now spending a trillion dollars on armaments and about 300 billion dollars on Afghanistan and Iraq,” Lewis told IPS.

”We are only talking of (relatively small) sums of money, a maximum of about 20 billion dollars by 2007, to save several millions of lives. There is something dreadfully out of whack,” he added.

As the spread of AIDS continues to outpace efforts to halt it, the region most affected by a shortage of resources is sub-Saharan Africa, where the disease is spreading at a rapid pace.

”The lack of funding for HIV/AIDS globally is indeed most apparent and most egregious in Africa, which is ground zero of the pandemic”, said Ann-Louise Colgan of the Washington-based advocacy group Africa Action.

”Africa’s marginalisation has not only left it most vulnerable to HIV/AIDS, but has also undermined the capacity of African countries to respond to this health crisis,” Colgan said.

Estimates of funding needed – to turn the tide of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa and globally – actually are very modest when compared to the vast resources devoted to military expenditure by the world’s richest countries, she added.

”But these same countries have consistently failed to provide the funding required to support African efforts to respond to HIV/AIDS. There appears to be a real international apathy when it comes to the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa,” Colgan said.

Zeitz, at the Global AIDS Alliance, said major donors the United States, the 25-member European Union, and Japan have been ”stingy.”

He said U.S. President George W. Bush made a commitment in Jan. 2003 to provide 15 billion dollars over a five-year period, of which 10 billion was to be new money.

”Everyone thought it would be about three billion dollars per year for a total 15 billion dollars. But they did not do it that way. They phased it slowly,” Zeitz said.

In 2004, the first budget year, Bush asked for two billion dollars but the U.S. Congress approved 2.4 billion dollars. In 2005, Bush sought 2.4 billion dollar but Congress awarded 2.9 billion. For 2006, Zeitz said, Bush is asking for 3.1 billion dollars.

”We don’t know what Congress is going to do. It will probably remain at that level,” he added. ”I don’t think we will see any significant increase.”

Lewis, the U.N. special envoy, said that prospects for action by the Group of Seven (G-7) industrial nations – the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, and Italy – hinge on the bloc’s next summit, scheduled for Scotland in July and to be chaired by British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

”It is really a question of whether Blair is going to be able to break through the G-7,” Lewis said. One way to resolve the problem, he added, would be for Blair and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown to persuade G-7 members to double their foreign aid.

Referring to the funding shortfall as ”huge”, Lewis said recent reports of an upsurge in funding were failed to recognise that ”that’s only because there was no money before”.

He also said that the ”big breakthrough” had to come from the United States. ”Nobody is closer to George Bush than Tony Blair. And if Bush is to move again dramatically, it will be Blair who has to push him,” Lewis added.

In January 2002 the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was established as a joint effort by governments, civil society, and the private sector. According to Colgan, the fund has proven to be an effective mechanism for addressing the pandemic in some 127 countries. But the fund also remains under-financed by the United States and other rich countries.

Despite the demonstrated efficacy of the global fund, the United States continues to favour its own unilateral approach to addressing HIV/AIDS in Africa and globally, Colgan said.

Yet Washington’s own initiative to address HIV/AIDS in Africa remains under-funded, and its focus on abstinence-only prevention programmes and its promotion of expensive brand-name treatments over generic versions of AIDS drugs contradict what is known about the most effective ways to stem the spread of the disease in Africa and elsewhere, AIDS experts have said.

Despite promises of attention to Africa this year at the upcoming G-7 summit and during a U.N. meeting on the Millennium Development Goals scheduled for September, Colgan predicted that no major new actions would flow from rich country governments this year.

In a report released before the U.N. Commission on Population and Development in early April, Annan said that since the first AIDS diagnosis in 1981, there have been more than 20 million deaths.

As of Dec. 2004, there were approximately 39.4 million people living with HIV, the virus that most scientists say causes AIDS. Rates of infection continue to rise, with an estimated 4.9 million people newly infected in 2004 alone, according to U.N. figures.