United Nations AIDS chief calls for debt cancellation to help tackle crisis

The Director of the United Nations agency, UN AIDS, made an urgent plea for debt cancellation on Sunday (9^th July) at an international conference on AIDS, saying that action "concerned the survival of the whole continent."

Peter Piot made the appeal at the 13^th conference on AIDS in Durban, South Africa. He pointed out that many countries continued to spend more on debt repayments than on health and called for debt cancellation to free up resources to tackle AIDS.

Mr Piot said, "It's time we make the connection between debt relief and epidemic relief, because one reason that many developing countries cannot invest enough in AIDS prevention is that they have to pay such a high proportion of their national budget" on foreign debt payments.

His comments were backed up by hundreds of AIDS activists in Durban, who marched through the city calling for debt cancellation as well as affordable anti-AIDS drugs. Earlier this year, African leaders, at a conference in Abuja on 25^th to 26^th April, committed themselves to ring-fencing debt relief in order to tackle AIDS, malaria and other infectious diseases. However their proposal has received little official response from the G7 governments.

In a pre-conference report, UN AIDS also showed that the $300 million currently given in international support paled in comparison with the $2 billion needed each year in sub-Saharan Africa alone, and the $15 billion she pays out in debt repayments each year.

The UN AIDS conference has underlined the extent of AIDS devastation of the African continent. The AIDS pandemic is already killing more than 2 million people a year in Africa alone. One in five people in Southern Africa is already HIV positive. Scientists have compared the scale of the AIDS crisis to the Black Death in Europe in the 14^th Century. President Mogae of Botswana warned that his country faced catastrophe because of the spread of AIDS: "We really are in a national crisis. We are threatened with extinction. People are dying in chillingly high numbers. We are losing the best of young people. It is a crisis of the first magnitude."

• Debt and AIDS- the two scourges of Africa