Call to raise EU funding to fight AIDS in poor countries

Date: 26/09/02

By David Cronin

MEPS have been urged to insist on an increase in EU funding for the fight against AIDS and other major killers in the world's poorest countries at a key meeting on the Union's proposed budget of €99.5 billion for 2003.

Next week, the Parliament's budget control committee will debate a set of conflicting proposals on tackling world poverty. One of these comes from the assembly's development committee which has suggested reducing the sum earmarked for Latin America by about 2.

The amount saved would then be funnelled into a €128 million initiative aimed at slashing deaths caused by AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.

Currently, the Commission proposes to spend €73 million tackling the so-called poverty diseases.

An alternative plan has been put forward by the foreign affairs committee. Drafted by Spanish Conservative José Ignacio Salafranca, it insists there should be no cut in funding for Latin America even though large sums of EU money previously allocated to it have gone unspent.

Socialist Richard Howitt, author of the development committee's report on the EU budget, also argues that the Union needs to be more generous towards AIDS victims worldwide if it is to maintain a seat on of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Representation at the top table of that fund, formed last year after pleas by UN Secretary-

General Kofi Annan for the industrialised world to take the AIDS pandemic more seriously, is secured according to a criteria based on donation size. Howitt has calculated that the Commission risks losing its seat unless it contributes at least €84 million.

Anti-AIDS activists have also argued that the entire amount of EU funding for action against the disease during 2003 should come from the Union's own budget. By contrast, the Commission is planning that some of it should come from the separate European Development Fund (EDF).

Critics of that policy say the Commission is not in a position to guarantee how the next tranche of EDF funding will be used at this stage because the so-called Cotonou agreement which underpins it has not yet been ratified by all EU states.

Jacqueline Bowman, European advocacy manager with reproductive health lobby Marie Stopes International, said: 'The Commission has publicly committed itself to funding that seat [on the Global Fund]. It has to be able to rejig its finances in such a way as to pay for what it said it will pay for.'

MEPs have been urged to insist on an increase in EU funding for the fight against AIDS and other major killers in the world's poorest countries at the forthcoming meeting of the European Parliament's budget control committee.