[NAFOPHANU] Stephen Lewis on the G8/G20 Failure to Deliver on AIDS

[Betty Iyamuremye]

hi all,
below is an interesting interview on G20 failure.......
read on
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SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: A major international conference on global AIDS
policy is underway in Austria this week, and there appears to be a growing a
rift over funding by rich nations. Some 20,000 policymakers, experts and
advocates have gathered in Vienna for the weeklong conference. On Sunday,
hundreds of people marched through the conference halls demanding rich
nations meet their pledges to ensure universal access to AIDS treatment.

Meanwhile, the head of the conference said world leaders lack the political
will to ensure that everyone infected with HIV and AIDS gets treatment.
Julio Montaner, the president of the International AIDS Society and chair of
the conference, criticized G8 countries for failing to meet the UN’s
Millennium Development Goals.

      JULIO MONTANER: I cannot hide my profound disappointment and deep
frustration with the recently concluded GI and G20 meetings in anywhere else
but Canada, by failing to take—by failing to take full responsibility for
the universal access pledge, and, more importantly, for failing to
articulate the next steps to meet not just the six MDGs, but also all of
them, because without universal access, there shall be no MDGs by 2015.


SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Well, on Monday, former US president Bill Clinton
fired back and railed against what he called inefficient spending of AIDS
funds and said many countries are misspending foreign aid.

      BILL CLINTON: In too many countries, too much money goes to pay for
too many people to go to too many meetings and get on too many airplanes and
do too many—to provide too much technical assistance. Too much is spent on
studies and reports that sit on shelves. And maybe when we got all of the
money in the world, this is regrettable, but not tragic, but keep in mind,
every dollar we waste today puts a life at risk. It is time for the United
States to lead the way and for other governments to do similar soul
searching and hardheaded analyses to see how we can take a higher percentage
of every country’s foreing aid budget and actually spend it in the countries
that the money was appropriated for, on the people the money was designed to
help, instead of on the apparatus in the country in question.


AMY GOODMAN: Clinton also called on aid groups to remember that the current
economic crisis is putting pressure on donations. A G8 report from last
month’s summit of world leaders in Canada acknowledged the AIDS treatment
targets will not be met by 2010.

Stephen Lewis is the former special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. He is the
co-founder
and co-director of AIDS-Free World, an international advocacy group based
here in New York. He’s joining us from the conference in Vienna.

Stephen Lewis, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you respond to President
Clinton?

STEPHEN LEWIS: Well, I think it’s probably fair to say, Amy, with a slight
variation on his words, that every dollar we waste today puts a life at
risk, and every dollar that the United States refuses to commit, having made
that commitment in the past, puts another life at risk. You can’t have it
both ways. And while my respect for the President is inestimable, I thought
that drawing undue attention to inefficiencies—we all acknowledge
inefficiencies—and taking issue perhaps rather strongly with the protesters
misses the mark.

This is a conference that understands that there are breakthroughs coming.
Treatment looks as though it leads to prevention. Just today at the
conference, we have an astonishing breakthrough on the discovery of a
microbicide. There is far more consciousness of injecting drug use. There is
a recognition of the concentrated epidemic about—among men who have sex with
men. We are on the cusp of moving the confrontation and subduing of HIV and
AIDS forward. And at precisely that moment in time, the G8, in general, and
the United States, in particular, decides to flatline and cut back their
budgets, and I cannot imagine anything more reprehensible.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And Stephen Lewis, you are the former UN ambassador
from Canada to the United Nations. You’re from Canada. The G8 was just held
in Canada, and the price tag for that conference for the security was
something upwards of a billion dollars. How far short are the G8 countries
in their funding pledges for AIDS access—universal access to treatment? And
how does this compare overall to funding for the G8 conference?

STEPHEN LEWIS: Well, the G8 conference funding was preposterous. We actually
spent more on funding three days of a conference than we pledged for five
years of assistance to maternal and child health. So if anybody wants to
understand how priorities are out of whack, that’s pretty dramatic.

In terms of the shortfall, we are, at this moment in time, something like
$10 billion to $11 billion short of what is required in 2010, and we will
continue to be equal or greater amount short in the years between now and
2015. And that, of course, is what is agitating this AIDS conference,
because we could be making breakthroughs, and yet the Global Fund to Fight
AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria will be desperately underfunded at the
replenishment conference this fall, and the presidential initiative in the
United States is flatlining.

I am, as you’ve identified, a Canadian, but it is hard for any of us to
believe, who put so much trust and confidence in the new president of the
United States, that this would be happening under the Obama administration.
It’s almost beyond the capacity of the mind to cope with that George Bush
seemingly was more engaged in the battle against HIV than Barack Obama.

AMY GOODMAN: You said in a news conference just after the G8 summit in your
country, in Toronto, that the G8 are congenitally addicted to betraying
Africa. Why?

STEPHEN LEWIS: Why? Because the most obvious example recently, although this
goes back over thirty, forty or fifty years of structural adjustment
programs, berserk and lunatic economic applications, which stripped the
social sectors of Africa at the behest of the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund—in terms of the G8 governments themselves, in
Gleneagles in 2005, they promised solemnly, they signed, they swore in
blood, as it were, that they would double the aid to Africa, so that Africa
would receive 25 billion additional dollars by 2010. And they have received
something like $10 billion to $13 billion, so they aren’t even halfway
there. How can that be described as anything other than a betrayal?

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And Ambassador Lewis, can you talk more about this
microbicide that’s getting a lot of attention now at the conference and
around the world?

STEPHEN LEWIS: Yes. We’ve been trying for so long—I say "we," that’s
presumptuous. The scientists have been trying for so long to discover a
vaccine or a microbicide. A microbicide is a gel or a foam or a cream,
vaginally applied for a period of time before and again after intercourse,
which can prevent transmission of the virus. And it gives women some
significant control over their own sexuality. We have made some
breakthroughs. There are intimations of progress in the realm of a vaccine,
but we’re still probably many years off.

Today, there was an announcement of a microbicide, a microbicide which draws
upon one of the antiretroviral drugs—it’s really very artful and inspired—as
a base for the foam or the gel or the cream. And it’s showing over one year
a 50 percent protection, and over two-and-a-half years, a 39 percent
protection. And that decline in protection is simply a matter of adhering to
the regimen, and that can be corrected. But frankly, in the realm of
preventive interventions, 39 percent, 50 percent, that’s astonishingly high
at the start. And it means that as they refine this microbial gel, it will
get better and better, and it is an exciting day for the science against the
virus.

AMY GOODMAN: Ambassador Lewis, a World Bank study says payments to girls in
poor countries can slow the spread of HIV. Can you explain?

STEPHEN LEWIS: Yes. These are transfer payments from the central government
of countries to sustain families where girls are living in child-headed
households—that is, households where both parents have been lost to the
pandemic of AIDS and the oldest sibling in the family looks after the
younger siblings, or households which are looked after by grandmothers, or
girls who are having trouble staying in school because they have to leave to
look after sick and ailing parents. And if there are transfer payments—and
they can be extremely small, they can be just a couple of dollars in the
course of a month—it can allow a girl to stay in school; it can allow for
some further nutritious food for the family; it can allow the young girl to
begin to play too soon, too prematurely in life, an adult role in the
absence of parents, but a role which is indispensable to her development and
to the family’s survival.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Well, on this issue of funding, Ambassador Lewis,
Clinton, in his comments, said that aid groups should remember that
countries are awash in trouble over the economic crisis, that donations are
more difficult to come by because of the recession. How has the Obama
administration responded to this criticism of funding?

STEPHEN LEWIS: Well, dare I describe that? I better say that I sit on
President Clinton’s Health Access Initiative board, and I think what the
Clinton Foundation done in Africa—has done in Africa and does in Africa is
possibly the most admirable intervention there is. So please take what I’m
about to say with the caution with which it’s imbued. That’s a kind of
neoliberal position for a neoliberal administration. The truth of the matter
is that when the financial crisis hit the United States, President Obama and
his colleagues were able to find some trillions of dollars between a
combination of stimulus funds, on the one hand, and bailing out the banks,
on the other, to maintain some kind of economic equilibrium in the economy.
I should point out that the banks are now experiencing large profits again,
and the economy is still in terrible shape—witness the unemployment.

What we are asking for—let’s take the Global Fund as an example—is one
billion additional dollars per year for three years. That’s less than
one-tenth of one percent of the money that’s being spent on stimulus and
bailing out the banks. It is so microscopic as to be barely discernible, and
yet it would save millions of lives. I go back to President Clinton’s
statement that every dollar wasted puts a life at risk. Every dollar the
United States refuses to contribute, based on a commitment which was
made—President Obama, during the election campaign, said he would
provide—and he actually signed this, as did Hillary Clinton, as did Joe
Biden—$50 billion over five years for AIDS alone. And they have retreated
and backtracked from that dramatically. And forgive me, but that will be
counted in human lives.

AMY GOODMAN: Stephen Lewis, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
here in the United States recently released a first-of-its-kind analysis
showing that 2.1 percent of heterosexuals living in high-poverty urban areas
in the United States are infected with HIV. The analysis suggests that many
low-income cities across the United States now have generalized HIV
epidemics, as defined by the UN Joint Program on HIV/AIDS, UNAIDS. Your
response?

STEPHEN LEWIS: Well, that’s, frankly, terrifying and deeply upsetting. The
definition of a generalized epidemic is anything over one percent. To think
that there are poor urban cores in the United States that have over two
percent is amazing. It’s heartbreaking. And, of course, it is particularly
pronounced amongst the African American population, and there’s no question
that women, African American women, in the prime of their life, in their
reproductive years, AIDS has now become the single highest killer, not
widely recognized.

So, the United States must have an internal indigenous policy which is as
strong as some of the international policies are. And President Obama, to be
fair, has just announced a new policy applicable to the United States. The
activist advocates, who have achieved so much, are critical of that policy.
They don’t think it’s adequately funded, and they’re not sure, they’re not
confident, of its implementation. And indeed, President Clinton, in his
speech, pointed out that there were some thousands of people on the waiting
list for treatment, even in the United States. That again takes one’s breath
away.

So you see, on so many fronts, this international emergency, whose carnage
is indescribable in the world, with 33 million people still living with
AIDS, the passivity, the indifference, the criminal and the delinquence in
the response that continues, when we’ve made progress. And we could turn it
around. Why, in Heaven’s name, are they slowing down now?

AMY GOODMAN: Stephen Lewis, we want to thank you very much for being with us
from Vienna, from the international AIDS conference. He’s former special
envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, a former Canadian ambassador to the United
Nations, and co-director of AIDS-Free World, an international AIDS advocacy
group that’s based here in New York.

http://www.pacificfreepress.com/news/1/6655-stephen-lewis-on-the-g8g20-failure-to-deliver-on-aids.html
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