Speech on HIV/AIDS Funding to Achieve Universal Acess

[Guest guest]

Speech by , UN Special Envoy, HIV/AIDS in Africa

19th annual symposium on Health and Philanthropy

Center on Philanthropy, Indiana University

August 24, 2006 --- For immediate release

The non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS), based in Washington,

tends to fly under the radar of public notoriety. But figures released this

week lead to a startling comparison. The CRS estimates that the monthly

United States expenditure in 2006 for the war in Iraq could hit $8 billion.

This means that the expenditure this month and every month this year on Iraq

is equal to the entire annual expenditure, in 2005, from all sources,

everywhere in the world, on AIDS (estimated at $8.3 billion).

Something is terribly wrong. And the monthly amount of $8 billion doesn't

even include the additional costs of the British deployment in Iraq.

However much some people may disagree with American and British foreign

policy, it is obviously the right of a sovereign state to decide what it

wants to spend on war. But what has happened to the moral anchor of the

world that so much can be devoted to conflict and so relatively little to a

plague that has forty million people in its lethal grip?

That's no rhetorical question. It is estimated that we will need $30 billion

a year by 2010 to fight AIDS. Where will the money come from? The G8

countries have already begun to default on the agreements on aid and trade,

made at the G8 Summit last year, but there's no default on the financing of

war.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is half a billion

short this year, and already over a billion short next year. How is that

possible when such strong commitments to fund the Fund were made by the G8?

Have we reached the point where the terror of AIDS is no match for the war

against terror?

In 2003, the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)

allocated $3 billion a year for five years, a generous allocation at the

time. But when it is renewed in 2008, will it increase the annual amount?

When the plan was first initiated, $3 billion annually was more than fifty

per cent of the estimated requirements. This year it represents 20 per cent

of what is needed. But in 2008, if the US pledge is reinstated at current

levels, that $3 billion annual expenditure will shrink to 14 per cent of the

requirements. Where will we find the rest of the money?

At the International AIDS Conference last week, we learned that the world

needs 4 million new health workers of every discipline, 2.4 million doctors,

nurses and midwives alone. Think of Africa, labouring at such debilitating

disadvantage: 11% of the world's population; 24% of the world's burden of

disease; 3% of the world's health workers and 1% of the world's expenditure

on health. It is estimated, Africa included, that we will need between $7.2

billion and $14 billion over the next five years just to restore human

capacity in the health sector. Where will the money come from?

I raise these questions not to be perverse. I raise these questions because

it seems to me to be indefensible to forever find money to prosecute wars,

but never to find sufficient money to treat the human condition.

When dealing with AIDS, the G8 countries promised universal access to

treatment, prevention and care by 2010. At the moment, the promise is

hollow. It is clear that swords come before ploughshares and bombs come

before health.

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Magill

Executive Assistant to

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