Acting Globally

Frontdesk June 2003
by David Waggoner

As anyone knows HIV is an expensive disease to treat. To prevent its spread would make the greatest economic sense of all. But on the eve of the G8 Summit in Evian, France, the world’s poorest HIV sufferers are being told to wait for badly needed assistance. This is unfortunate because, for the forty million lives at stake, this year’s foremost economic summit is their only hope for turning around the AIDS crisis.

After prescribing billions for the fight against AIDS, why is George W. Bush not willing to draw upon this cash reserve? To have funded an AIDS initiative and then to withdraw the political means to support it is akin to sending a starving village a crate of canned beef without bothering to include a can opener. The water may be pure in Evian, but the public relations campaign for an AIDS-free world is pure bullshit!

HIV is a disease fraught with political and economic dimensions that requires more than just deficit spending. It requires our leaders to disregard the monetary cost of saving so many lives. It takes the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to keep AIDS, tuberculosis, and other maladies in the forefront of the world’s attention. Yet, the Global Fund is facing bankruptcy while the European Development Fund hordes ten billion euros and while Bush does his best to portray that he is nurturing cooperation between the industrialized nations of the world–who can afford to fund a cure–and the impoverished countries who can’t even afford aspirin.

One harrowing aspect of this problem is that the president of the richest free trade zone in history is doing his best to block the efforts of the World Trade Organization to–in the words of Health GAP (Global Access Project)–"secure broader access to exported generic medicines for poor countries with inefficient capacity for local production of medicines." With President Bush’s celebrated five-year plan to spend $10 billion for AIDS prevention and healthcare in the most seriously affected regions of the globe, most Americans would probably laugh at my assertion that what the only superpower on the planet is doing is paying lip service. Its anti-HIV efforts amount to slowing the spread of HIV, but also guaranteeing that it will be around well into the next century.

AIDS has a good chance–regardless of whether you believe in miracles, cures, or the good will of men–to create dead zones the size of Africa and South Asia in the next twenty years. No continent is safe from its ravages, but only some continents are guaranteed all but certain servitude to the West’s exportation of its anti-AIDS policies to parts of the globe where it won’t work. Human suffering on a scale never imaginable by the most dystopian imaginations are the future for millions. George Orwell would have never thought up such a world. Nor would have the great medical inventors of previous centuries: Madame Curie, Jonas Salk, or even Louis Pasteur.

So while the G8 Summit is toasting champagne, wouldn’t it be wise to point to the human degradation going on in less elegant settings? Wouldn’t the HIV-positive mother of four living without antiretrovirals in Botswana want to ask the summit’s leaders why her government can’t import, manufacture, or distribute life-saving medicines? It makes you want to know what free trade means, after all.

Amanda Lugg of Health GAP pointed out the insincerity of the industrialized nations’ campaign to stop or even prevent AIDS: "The UK announced this week they would extend their miserly contribution of $40 million annually out two more years to 2007 and 2008...the Global Fund’s cash crunch of $1.4 billion is happening now." It’s like sending in five National Guardsmen to topple Saddam Hussein. But the dictator of Iraq was a visible enemy. HIV is an invisible army that the world’s richest governments need to fight with very visible monetary actions.

Spending money now, rather than later, is a wise economic decision for those countries who can afford to help out. The West cannot afford to close the AIDS bank to those who need to withdraw the necessary funds the most.