By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 3 2002 (IPS)

A U.N.-sponsored global fund to fight AIDS is “desperately under-funded”, a senior U.N. official warned Wednesday.

“What has not yet resonated are the dollars to meet the commitment,” Stephen Lewis, the U.N. Special Envoy on HIV-AIDS in Africa, told reporters.

Lewis described the shortfall as “staggering”. The international community is short of “billions and billions of dollars meant to prolong and save human life in Africa over the next generation”.

On Tuesday, the U.N. said that the constantly rising number of AIDS cases world-wide contradicted the widespread myth that the disease had reached a saturation point. At least 68 million people in 45 countries will die of the disease in the next two decades, added UNAIDS in its annual report.

Since it was first diagnosed in 1981, HIV-AIDS has killed more than 20 million people world-wide – mostly in Africa. Today, 40 million people live with HIV-AIDS, according to UNAIDS.

The ‘Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria’, inaugurated by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan early this year, has generated only about two billion dollars, far short of its targeted 10 billion dollars.

The first grants, worth about 400 million dollars have been given to 40 anti-AIDS programmes in 31 countries. A similar amount has been earmarked for the fight against tuberculosis and malaria.

Global spending on AIDS this year is expected to reach about 2.8 billion dollars, but that is still far behind target.

Jeffrey Sachs, a former professor at Harvard University and a special adviser to the secretary-general, said that millions of people were dying of preventable diseases simply because they were impoverished.

“They are too poor to be able to afford to stay alive,” he told a high-level meeting of the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Tuesday. “We are living in a global health crisis with its epicentre in Africa.”

Sachs said the necessary money is readily available. The arithmetic is simple: one penny of every 10 dollars of income in the rich countries would generate about 25 billion dollars.

“But the penny won’t drop”, said Lewis, who agrees with Sachs that donor nations are not forthcoming with funds to fight the global epidemic.

The United States, which has earmarked about 36 billion dollars to fight terrorism, has pledged about 500 million dollars to the Global Fund, described as “peanuts” by AIDS activists.

“We are committed to increase our contribution as the Fund shows results,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill told the ECOSOC meeting Monday.

He also said that U.S. President George W. Bush has doubled the amount the U.S. spends internationally on AIDS, to 1.1 billion dollars, “devoting far more to fighting AIDS than any other nation”.

“We are determined to focus our assistance where it will make a difference, and where it can, we have committed to do more,” O’Neill said.

But Darin Johnson of AIDS Action says that the measly U.S. contribution shows that HIV-AIDS is not high on the administration’s list of health care priorities.

Paul Zeitz, director of the Global Aids Alliance, argues that the United States is missing a tremendous opportunity to help stop the global AIDS crisis. The U.S. pledge, he points out, is perhaps the smallest contribution by percentage of any donor country.

In July last year, the leaders of the Group of Eight industrialised countries – the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan and Russia – pledged about 1.3 billion dollars to the Global Fund.

In September 2000, the 189 members of the U.N. General Assembly approved a set of ‘Millennium Development Goals’ which included pledges to eradicate poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education and reverse the spread of HIV-AIDS, malaria and other diseases – all by the year 2015.

But most delegates concede that none of the goals will be met by the target date, primarily because of lack of funds.

Addressing the ECOSOC meeting Tuesday, Ghana’s Minister of Economic Planning Paa Kwesi Nduom said the international community was responsible for creating the global environment to assist development.

He criticised new protectionist measures adopted by rich countries to shut out products from developing nations. “Those concerns affected national capacities to mobilise and deploy domestic resources to meet development goals. That had a particular effect on human resources development in the areas of education and health,” he added.

Nduom also criticised the rising levels of farm subsidies in Europe and North America, at a time when developing nations were being encouraged to adopt liberal market reforms.

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