Inter Press Service - October 23, 2000
Marwaan Macan-Markar

For the four recipients, from countries as far afield as Nicaragua an d French Polynesia, were recognised for their efforts to "fight against poverty and its underlying causes, specifically HIV/AIDS" in their communities.

According to the UN Development Programme (UNDP), similar efforts are needed across the developing world to expose the manner in which the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) that causes AIDS is contributing to an e scalation of poverty.

"This killer disease cannot be reduced to a health issue. Its spread is reversing years of development and reducing more people into poverty, " says Hakan Bjorkman, a policy advisor for UNDP on HIV/AIDS.

Nevertheless, admits Bjorkman, such a nexus has still to be heeded among policy-makers in the South. "There are ministries of finance that are still in denial about the impact of AIDS."

The UNDP has taken another crack at this culture of denial, choosing 'Breaking the Silence on HIV/AIDS' as its theme to mark the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, celebrated Monday.

"We want to make policy-makers aware about the broader implications of AIDS," remarked Bjorkman.

The UNDP's drive follows similar calls made this year to recognise th is vicious cycle - the economic and social consequences of a disease that has become the fourth most common cause of death worldwide.

At the Thirteenth International Conference on AIDS, held in July in Durban, South Africa, new research revealed that this pandemic had begun to have an "immense impact on the economies of hard-hit countries, hurting not only individuals, families and firms, but also significantly slowing economic growth and worsening poverty".

In South Africa, where close to one-fifth of the population is infect ed with HIV, a report jointly published by the World Bank and the UN's depart ment for AIDS (UNAIDS) predicted that the gross domestic product would be "17 percent lower by 2010 that it would have been without AIDS".

In Botswana, which currently has a 36 percent HIV prevalence rate "the highest in the world" the report warned that the country would face "a rapid increase in the number of very poor and destitute household in the coming decade".

According to UNAIDS, furthermore, the impact of the pandemic on education has been equally severe. On the eve of the Durban conference, it declared in a study that AIDS was not only "eroding the supply of teachers and increasing class sizes", but also "eating into family budgets".

Equally debilitating has been the effect on business. In Africa, it stated, managers at a sugar estate had admitted to 8,000 days of lost labour due to HIV between 1995-1997. In addition, there had been a 50 percent drop in processed sugar recovered from raw sugar cane between 1993-1997.

And prior to that, UNAIDS teemed up with the UN's Food and Agricultur e Organisation (FAO) to shed light on the rural face of this disease. HIV/AIDS has become a rural epidemic and it has to be perceived as not only a health issue but a development concern, too, these agencies argued.

They added, moreover, that if ignored, AIDS would threaten "sustainable agriculture and rural development". This, they pointed out, was evident by the amount of land "that is no longer available for agriculture" due to deaths in the family and tending of the sick.

What prevails in West Africa illustrates such concern, where the cultivation of cash crops and food products have reduced, including "market gardening in Burkina Faso and cotton, coffee and cocoa plantations in Cote d'Ivoire".

The need to establish the link between AIDS and poverty is a matter o f urgency to "avoid a complete development disaster", says Bjorkman.

And that is understandable in light of the devastation AIDS has wrought. By the end of last year, states UNAIDS, some 18.8 million people had died from the disease, resulting in 13.2 million children orphaned worldwide, 95 percent of them from Africa.

By the end of 1999, furthermore, there were 34.3 million adults and children living with HIV/AIDS, with a majority of them - 24.5 million from sub-Saharan Africa. Last year alone, there were 5.4 million new infections detected. For the UNDP, such a dismal reality sets HIV/AIDS apart from other "traditional health killers" ravaging the developing world.

It has put "huge additional demand on already weak, hard to access public services", says Mark Malloch Brown, the UNDP's administrator. "It is setting up the terms of a desperate conflict over inadequate resources."

And to remedy that, adds Bjorkman, the culture of denial has to be challenged.

"We need to break the silence to focus on what needs to be done."

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