ADDIS ABABA, Oct 12 (AFP) - Africa's farmers and rural communities have become the forgotten victims of HIV/AIDS, health experts and political leaders from the across the continent were told Tuesday at a conference in Addis Ababa.
Rural communities are being torn apart while the bulk of AIDS prevention and support work focusses on the continent's cities, according to speakers at the UN's Commission on HIV/AIDS and Governance in Africa (CHGA).
Development workers, researchers and politicians, including Kenneth Kaunda, the former president of Zambia, were in the Ethiopian capital for the commission's third session of open discussions and debates.
The discussions will feed into CHGA's final report on the long-term impact of the pandemic in Africa, which is due to be submitted to the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in June 2005.
"Earlier in the pandemic, HIV/AIDS was viewed merely as an urban phenomenon, and most of the response is still focussed there," said K.Y. Amoako, Executive Secretary of the UN's Economic Commission for Africa, as he opened the session.
"Now, however, we can see that the epidemic has spread to our rural areas where the vast majority of Africans live," he added.
"Households are losing key productive members in their prime and communities are losing the main producers of food. Crucial knowledge is lost and the fabric of rural communities is being torn apart," he said.
The Commission includes prominent international figures among its members, including Joy Phumaphi, the World Health Organisation's assistant Director General, Peter Piot, head of UNAIDS, and Richard Feachem, head of the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
Africa accounts for 25 million out of the estimated 38 million people across the world infected with HIV. The vast majority of infected Africans are women, according to UNAIDS estimates.
The conference was also addressed by Ethiopian President Girma W. Giogis, who told delegates that Africa's families were taking the brunt of the epidemic.
"Our cemeteries are filled beyond capacity. Parents are dying from HIV/AIDS or burying their children; a generation of fathers and mothers is being lost leaving the grandparents to grieve and raise the next generation," he said.
"The resulting social decay and community breakdown is threatening the socio-economic fabric of our continent, particularly in southern and eastern Africa," he added.
Joseph Tumushabe, of Uganda's Makerere University, told the conference that 70 percent of the world's HIV/AIDS sufferers were from Africa, and that two-thirds of the populations of the continent's 25 most affected countries were based in rural areas.
"We are now coming to the point where we are going to get information and statistics and data with regard to what is happening to the population, particularly in rural areas. If we are going to going to confront HIV/AIDS, we have got to look at rural areas and communities," he said.
The problems of AIDS are exacerbated outside cities, he added, because such communities are more vulnerable to a range of social and economic ills, including famine, floods and conflict.
As key workers and family members succumb to AIDS, more children are taken out of school, oral knowledge and traditional farming practices die out and the range of crops grown contracts, he explained.
Later this year, the commission will meet in Ghana to discuss the impact of AIDS on the world of work and again in Cameroon to discuss gender and AIDS orphans.
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