Wall Street Journal - September 7, 2005
Michael M. Phillips, michael.phillips@wsj.com

The pledges, made at a donors' conference in London, fell well short of the $7.1 billion the Global Fund calculates it will need for 2006-07.

"The current funding gap will have devastating effects...depriving poor women, men and children from the hope of accessing life-saving prevention and treatment services of TB, malaria and HIV," Anandi Yuvaraj, a member of the Geneva-based Global Fund's board of directors, said in a written statement.

Other officials stressed the positive, saying they were gratified that a number of countries, such as the United Kingdom, had doubled their previous donations. The pledging session was "a very useful and solid step in the right direction," said Richard Feachem, the Global Fund's executive director. "But that gap, between $3.7 billion and $7.1 billion, has got to be filled."

The sum raised in London would be sufficient for the Global Fund to continue projects already begun, but would leave little room for new grants to expand the fund's reach, according to international health officials.

Health activists faulted the Bush administration for pledging just $600 million for the two-year period. France's pledge of $689 million pushed it ahead of the U.S. as the single-largest donor for the period, and European nations as a whole account for at least 60% of the Global Fund's new support. "I wish other donors would make the same commitment," Louis Michel, European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, told reporters, echoing language that U.S. policy makers and legislators used when the U.S. was the leading donor.

Ambassador Randall Tobias, who heads President Bush's international AIDS efforts, said the critics ignore the fact that the U.S. remains the world's largest provider of anti-AIDS funding -- the bulk of it through mechanisms other than the Global Fund. In his State of the Union Address in January 2003, Mr. Bush promised a $10 billion increase in U.S. global AIDS spending over five years.

Mr. Tobias said that, including money for the Global Fund, the president will seek $6.5 billion for global AIDS programs between fiscal years 2006 and 2007, a plan that he says will keep the administration on track to fulfill the president's promise. "What we're doing is so much greater than anybody else," he said at the close of the London pledging session.

Under federal law, the U.S. can contribute no more than one-third of the Global Fund resources, a ceiling that Congress imposed in the hopes that it would prompt greater generosity from others. Now the U.S. share of new pledges has fallen to 16% of the total and could fall further as fresh commitments roll in from other countries.

Given past administration rhetoric about its contribution, some AIDS activists believe the U.S. now should increase its contribution to maintain the one-third participation. However, "the signs we're seeing here are that [the U.S. is] moving away from their commitment to one-third," said Richard Burzynski, executive director of the International Council of AIDS Service Organizations, a coalition of thousands of AIDS groups. Mr. Burzynski, who attended the negotiations, said that U.S. negotiators fought hard, but unsuccessfully, to keep the final conference document from including an estimate that the world will have to spend $25.3 billion to successfully combat AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria through 2007.

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