U.S. to Set Aside Cash for Global AIDS Fund

The United States will set aside $120 million for the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to give European donors time to come up with a bigger share for 2004, the U.S. AIDS czar said on Wednesday.

The United States will set aside $120 million for the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to give European donors time to come up with a bigger share for 2004, the U.S. AIDS czar said on Wednesday.Randall Tobias, the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, said he would hold the money until September, when European nations come back from summer vacations.He could have appropriated the cash for other programs under his purview but instead is holding it in case he can add it to the $360 million the United States has already put into the Fund for this year.”I have decided to use my discretion to create a one-time response,” Tobias wrote in a letter to Fund Director Richard Feachem.”I therefore intend to hold in abeyance the approximately $120 million in funds that will likely revert to me, for the purpose of creating a new incentive opportunity for the Global Fund to generate new and unanticipated contributions.”He said on Sept. 30 he would see how much other countries have given and would increase the U.S. share accordingly.”I hope that at the end of this one-time window, all of the U.S. funds held in abeyance on July 31 will help generate additional non-U.S. government contributions, and, in turn, become eligible for transfer to the Global Fund,” he wrote.Tobias has been under heavy pressure to raise the U.S. contribution to the Fund.But the United States has other AIDS programs as well, notably a $15 billion, five-year initiative targeting select countries in Africa and the Caribbean and Vietnam. And by law the United States can give no more than a third of the Fund’s operating budget.The Global Fund was created in 2002 as the brainchild of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, with the help of the World Bank and other organizations. It accepts proposals for local HIV and AIDS programs and decides which to fund.It has asked for $3 billion a year, $1.2 billion of this from the United States.In July Global Fund Director Richard Feachem said it had so far received pledges of just $1 billion and was in a bad cash crunch.AIDS activists said they were encouraged by the flexibility shown in the move but said the United States did not give nearly enough to the Global Fund anyway.”This is flexibility after the damage has been done,” said David Bryden of the Global AIDS Alliance.”This is flexibility on the part of an administration that is trying to undermine the Fund and destroy the Fund in terms of its original vision. It is flexibility that we are glad to see. But the real question is what is going to happen to the Fund?”Bryden said AIDS groups had a pledge in writing from John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for president, that he would double U.S. AIDS funding if elected in November. (Source: Reuters, August 2004)