American aid agencies expressed concern on Friday over new rules imposed by the Bush administration making funding for the fight against Aids dependent on a pledge to combat prostitution.
Charities seeking federal funding for anti-Aids programmes abroad will have to sign a form expressing opposition to prostitution and sex trafficking. They will also have to inform aid recipients of condom failure rates.
The conditions reflect a push by conservative Christian groups for emphasis on sexual abstinence rather than precautions in the Bush administration’s anti-Aids campaign.
They will affect the disbursement of $2,2-billion in grants and contracts from the United States Agency for International Development (USAid).
No USAid officials were available for comment on Friday but Kent Hill, the acting administrator for global health, told the Associated Press that the pledge is a way for the US to take a stand against a life he called degrading and debilitating.
”Prostitution is not a positive for the people who are involved in it,” he said. ”The vast majority of people, globally, do not find themselves there by choice.”
Several agencies fighting Aids have argued that the pledge is counter-productive because it would stigmatise prostitutes and make it more difficult to teach them how to protect themselves from infection.
”Our position is that this doesn’t address the root causes,” said Terri Bartlett, vice-president for public policy at Population Action International, a research group that does not accept federal money.
”There are huge concerns and considerations that it will harm the most difficult and the most important programmes.”
Catholic Relief Services (CRS), which approves of the anti-prostitution message, is concerned about the administrative costs that a legal pledge would entail.
”We might be required to install a huge bureaucracy, because we would have to verify that none of our partners are pro-prostitution,” Michael Wiest, CRS’s vice-president, said.
”If we had to require the Archbishop of Ouagadougou to sign a pledge against prostitution, that’s hard to do. And we have 20 000 partners.”
Congress approved the pledge in 2003 and it was first applied to foreign recipients of US aid, leading in May to Brazil’s decision not to accept $40-million for its Aids programme.
The Justice Department questioned whether the imposition of such rules infringed US-based charities’ constitutional right to freedom of expression. But the department dropped its objections last year and the rule has now gone into effect.
Foreign family-planning groups receiving US federal funds are also banned from discussing the possibility of abortion with their clients.
The ”global gag rule”, as it is known to its critics, originated under Ronald Reagan’s administration. It was dropped by Bill Clinton but then reinstated by George Bush immediately on taking office in January 2001.
Meanwhile, the Brazilian government was on Friday involved in critical negotiations with a US drug company over lowering the price of a crucial Aids medication.
The health ministry had warned it would break the drug’s patent and start producing a cheaper, generic version of the anti-retroviral Kaletra unless Abbott Laboratories sharply cut its price for the Brazilian market by midnight on Thursday. — Guardian Unlimited Â