Thursday, July 10, 2003

Beware of Bush Bearing Gifts by Louise Richards 07 Jul 03 Bush's commitment to provide additional funds lays down the gauntlet to European Union, and not before time. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is in dire need of money. But should we be thankful for Bush's lead on this issue? It's a debatable point. Behind the headlines - and qualified support from international NGOs for the new funds - lies a different story. To start with, only $10 billion of Bush's pledged $15 billion is new. Second, as ActionAid has pointed out, there's no guarantee that this money will be spent over the next five years. The U.S. Congress has to sign off the funds each year, and recent history is littered with aid initiatives that slid into the sand. A recent joint report from U.S. think-tanks the Center for Global Development and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that as little as $45 million of Bush's money to fight AIDS will be spent in 2004. There is also the question of whether the funds will be tied aid - a hallmark of U.S. official development assistance. Revealingly, the USA has said it will deliver only one third of pledged dollars through the Global Fund, with the remaining money coming as bilateral aid. The Global Fund was set up specifically to be free of the conditionality associated with tied aid and it champions the purchase of the cheaper generic drug treatments central to fighting HIV/AIDS in the least-developed countries. The USA has in fact opened its taxpayers' chequebook to safeguard the patent rights of its powerful pharmaceutical lobby. The Bush plan states that 2 million sufferers of HIV/AIDS will be provided with drug treatments. This could be a bonanza for U.S. drug corporations whose AIDS drug sales in Africa account for just 0.2 per cent of turnover. If other U.S. aid programmes are anything to go by, contracts to supply treatments will be offered to US pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, which reportedly rakes in profits of more than $1 million an hour. Yet overseas manufacturers of generic treatments can massively undercut the price of Western drugs. [OneWorld.net] 8:09:23 AM  Google It!