The future of the world’s largest fund for the fight against Aids hangs in the balance.
The United Nations’s Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria is threatened by underfunding by the United States in favour of its own Aids programme, as well as from G8 countries.
And clashes between two of the UN’s Aids leaders also emerged this week at the International Aids Conference in Bangkok as a further threat to the Global Fund.
A UN memorandum leaked to journalists at the conference exposed for the first time tensions between Peter Piot, UNAids executive director, and Richard Feachem, executive director of the Global Fund.
On June 30 Piot sent the memorandum to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, questioning Feachem’s management style. It was aimed at updating Annan on the financial crisis facing the Global Fund in 2005.
The memorandum expresses Piot’s concern that the US has threatened to withdraw from the Global Fund if Feachem does not provide proper business proposals. It says ”the board raised concerns around the executive director’s management”.
The conference heard calls from Annan that increased spending in the fight against Aids is urgently needed, despite an overall increase in funding since the Barcelona conference in 2002. In an interview with the BBC he called on US President George W Bush to make the same level of commitment to fighting the HIV/Aids pandemic as he made to ending terrorism.
A recent board meeting of the Global Fund was meant to launch the fifth round of calls for Aids campaign proposals in 2005. But because of a lack of pledges from G8 countries and a deficit of $100-million in 2004, the fund had to postpone the announcement.
It now faces an acute cash crunch in 2005. A report released this week by the Global Fund said current pledges are expected to peak at $3-billion a year by 2008, of which just more than half will be spent on Aids. Mark Milano, a member of the US Aids lobby group, said the US had set the bar by pledging $1-billion a year when the Global Fund was established in 2002.
The US was to provide 33% of the Global Fund’s allocation; another third would come from G8 countries; and the final third from smaller countries and the private sector.
Milano said for the 2004 fiscal year, the US had allocated $200-million to the fund — compared with the $1,2-billion it had originally undertaken to provide.
”Fund the Fund” has become the mantra of the conference. Activists displayed placards proclaiming ”Liar” and ”Shame” when Randall Tobias, Aids coordinator in the Bush administration, spoke at the conference. They say Tobias lies when he claims the US is not underfunding the Global Fund. They also say the US uses the President’s Emergency Aids Relief plan to gain political leverage over developing countries.
Milano said the Global Fund is undermined by the fact that Tommy Thompson, US Secretary of Health and Human Services, chairs the Global Fund’s board. Thompson was shouted down two years ago at the Barcelona Aids conference and has not attended the current one. Activists claim Thompson’s position on the board makes it easier for the US to monitor the Global Fund and ensure that it does not criticise US funding.
US NGOs called a press conference on Thursday to discuss the implications for global Aids funding of the US elections. ”The US delegates to the Aids conference are calling on US citizens to make the Aids pandemic a major consideration when deciding how to vote in the upcoming elections.”
Additional reporting by Rosemary Okello, GEM News