U.N. commits to AIDS reduction

Some question the need for a new U.N. bureaucracy to deal with the AIDS crisis. In her speech before the General Assembly, Britain's international development secretary, Clare Short, told member nations, "It is my strongly held view that we waste too much time and energy in U.N. conferences and special sessions. We use up enormous energy in arguing at great length over texts that provide few, if any, follow-up mechanisms or assurances that governments and U.N. agencies will carry forward the declarations that are agreed to. Poor countries have to commit ministers, officials and resources to participating in a U.N. talking shop, when such people are needed to tackle the desperate problem HIV/AIDS poses at home."

Short's criticisms were shared by Carole Collins, the HIV/AIDS director of Britain's Christian AID. "There were lots of raised expectations; people were hopeful about the fund," she said. "But we now know that there's only been a small amount of money pledged and that trying to administer it [will be difficult] ... When you ask them how they will create these boards, they say they've referred them to working groups that haven't been established yet. It's going to be very problematic. The lack of reference to community strengths was a serious omission." Collins also said that despite Annan's support for community-based programs, they had only been paid lip service in the declaration.

Collins has a point on the financing of the fund. Annan has said that $7 billion to $10 billion is required to seriously address the HIV/AIDS crisis, but by the end of the day Wednesday, the U.N. had managed to get only $500 million worth of pledges from countries -- and some of them would not specify whether the money would go to general AIDS expenditures or to programs funded by the U.N. AIDS superfund. So far, the financing of the fund has been an unmitigated disaster.

But that could change. Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives reached an agreement Wednesday to spend as much as $1.36 billion during the next fiscal year to fight AIDS globally. As much as $750 million of that could be used for multilateral aid, including the U.N. AIDS superfund. The amount agreed on was significantly higher than the annual AIDS expenditure of $480 million pledged by the Bush administration, via Colin Powell, on Monday.

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