Inter Press Service - November 26, 2003
Jim Lobe

The money, part of a 17.1-billion-dollar foreign aid package that is being folded into a nearly 400-billion-dollar fiscal year (FY) 2004 spending bill, also includes 550 million dollars for the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria -- 350 million dollars more than Bush asked for.

Anti-AIDS activists say they are encouraged by the increases, although they also stressed the totals still fell far short of what is needed to combat the epidemic which, according to estimates from UNAIDS released Monday, will have taken three million lives in 2003, nearly 80 percent of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

"This is a clear indication that the Republicans in Congress have broken with the president's policy," Paul Zeitz, executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance, told IPS.

The foreign-aid package also includes one billion dollars to set up the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA), a controversial initiative announced by Bush some 18 months ago that would increase aid to poor countries that pursue economic and governance policies favoured by the administration.

The MCA is controversial primarily because most of the world's poorest countries cannot satisfy the basic criteria for eligibility and because it sets up a new bureaucracy apart from the Agency for International Development (USAID), which has built up expertise in poverty-reduction programmes.

The total appropriations bill, which covers everything from highway projects to food labelling, comes to 373 billion dollars and must still be approved by both houses of Congress, either when they return from Thanksgiving recess Dec. 8 or, if that proves impossible, after the Christmas vacation in January.

While the overall bill's fate still remains uncertain due to complaints from Democrats and some Republicans about specific provisions, virtually all of the concerns involve domestic programmes; the deal struck over the foreign aid package is likely to survive whenever the bill is finally passed.

The 17.1 billion dollars for aid represents a six percent increase over spending for FY 2003, which actually ended Sep. 30.

But the total comes to less than the 20 billion dollars in reconstruction and other aid for Iraq and Afghanistan that was approved by Congress in an emergency appropriation earlier this month and to less than four percent of the 460 billion dollars Congress has approved for next year's Pentagon budget.

Of the 17.1 billion, moreover, three billion dollars are earmarked for Israel, whose per capita income far exceeds the vast majority of developing countries. Another three billion dollars will go to three other countries: Egypt, Jordan and Colombia.

Nearly one billion dollars is to be spent on international anti-drug operations. About 731 million dollars of that total will be devoted to fighting drug trafficking in the Andes.

For development assistance, the package includes 1.8 billion dollars for child survival and health initiatives (516.5 million dollars of which are wrapped into the global AIDS section), 185 million dollars for other infectious diseases, 330 million dollars for maternal and child health and 375 million dollars for bilateral family planning programmes.

A total of 1.4 billion dollars is allocated to other kinds of bilateral development aid, including education initiatives, but some of that money will also go to the MCA.

In addition, 913 million dollars will go to the soft-loan facility of the World Bank, the International Development Association, and 95 million dollars to the restructuring of bilateral debt held by poor recipients.

Slightly more than one billion dollars will be allocated for international disaster, migration and refugee assistance, while 321 million dollars are assigned to international organisations, with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) getting the largest share -- 120 million dollars.

The U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) is supposed to receive 34 million dollars, the same amount that Congress appropriated for it in FY 2002 but was withheld by the Bush administration on the grounds that UNFPA's support for China's population programme violated a 20-year-old law that bans aid to any organisation that supports or participates in coercive abortions or sterilisations.

The administration's position on UNFPA represented a novel and controversial interpretation of the so-called Kemp-Kasten amendment. Previous administrations, including Republican ones, merely subtracted the aid spent by UNFPA in China from its total annual contribution.

But largely at the behest of his anti-abortion supporters and despite the findings of a special State Department delegation that UNFPA neither supported nor participated directly in coercive abortions or sterilisations in China, Bush withheld the 35 million dollars in 2002 and another 25 million dollars earmarked by Congress for FY 2003.

Under a complicated deal worked out by negotiators from the two houses, 34 million dollars will automatically go to UNFPA in 2004 unless Bush makes a formal finding that the agency is violating Kemp-Kasten.

The 25 million dollars withheld last year will go to a new initiative to combat trafficking in women and children, and the so-called Mexico City policy, which bars funding to any organisation that performs or promotes abortions, will remain in force.

The Senate had voted earlier this year to overturn the policy, but Bush threatened to veto any bill that did not include it.

Whether Bush will again try to prevent the 34 million dollars from going to UNFPA remains unclear. "We are hopeful but not necessarily optimistic that the president will allow the money to be spent," said Sally Ethelston of Population Action International (PAI), who noted that "delegation after delegation and report after report have all concluded that UNFPA is a force for good in China".

While anti-AIDS activists were encouraged about Congress's decision to increase funding to both the overall AIDS initiative and the Global Fund, they also expressed their frustration with certain conditions attached to the package. These include a stipulation that one-third of all money allocated for AIDS prevention initiatives (25 percent of the total) be earmarked for programmes that encourage abstinence.

"We're gravely concerned by that, because there's no scientific evidence that such programmes work anywhere in the world," said Zeitz. "It amounts to moralistic imperialism and a waste of desperately needed funding."

Salih Booker, director of Africa Action, said the total amount was too little given the scope of the crisis. "Bush still doesn't support the distribution of generic drugs, which is what Africa really needs," he said.

Booker stresses that the president's new global AIDS tsar, Randall Tobias, retired last year as the CEO of one of the companies, Eli Lilly, that has opposed easing international patent laws that make it much more expensive to get anti-AIDS drugs to the people who need them.

The administration is sending its top anti-AIDS officials -- including Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson and Tobias to Africa in for World AIDS Day on Monday. They will be joined by UNAIDS director Peter Piot and the new director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), a prospect, said Booker, which should lay bare the cynicism of Bush's policies.

"They're all going to be there smiling, but the fact that Thompson has not supported more-aggressive action and more funding and what with Tobias seen as a symbol of Big Pharma, their presence actually undermines hope for dealing with the worst epidemic in recorded history," he said.

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+Global AIDS Alliance (http://www.globalaidsalliance.org)

+Population Action International (http://www.populationaction.org/)

+Africa Action (http://www.africaaction.org/action/brokenprom0309.htm)

(END/IPS/NA/DV/IP/HE/SD/JL/ML/03)

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