PARIS (Reuters) - Third World countries may miss out on any major new aid when leaders of the world's richest nations meet on Sunday with anti-terror measures and post-war reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan on their minds.
Irish musician Bob Geldof, who staged the world's biggest rock concert to help Africa's starving in 1985, added his voice this week to pleas for the Group of Eight to remember Africa at its June 1-3 summit at the French Alpine resort town of Evian.
French President Jacques Chirac has promised a pro-Third World agenda, but aid groups and some analysts are sceptical.
"There is the danger that the summit will be dominated by issues of war and peace and Iraq reconstruction," said Neville Gabriel, a spokesman for Jubilee South Africa, a group seeking more debt relief for Africa, the world's poorest continent.
In the five years since 70,000 people protested at the G8 summit in Birmingham, only eight states have received big debt write-offs under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries scheme.
Actual, rather than promised, debt stock reduction is just $36.3 billion (22.2 billion pounds), less than a third of the $110 billion promised in 1999 at the Cologne conference of the G8 -- the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan plus Russia.
"We are pessimistic that they are going to achieve much (at Evian)," a spokeswoman for Oxfam said, adding that on a scale of zero to 10, she rated the group's achievements at three, notably on providing fairer trade terms, debt relief and health funding.
More than half of sub-Saharan Africa's 600 million people live on less than $1 a day and 40 percent of children never go to school -- the only region in the world where the numbers of children out of school are rising, according to Oxfam and data from the United Nations Development Programme.
African states want backing for an ambitious pan-regional initiative, NEPAD, to reduce poverty, strengthen democracy, reduce an external debt burden estimated at $300 billion, guarantee affordable drugs to treat HIV-AIDS and promote trade.
But political analysts say the G8 feels NEPAD's key African promoters have failed to meet pledges that the continent will tackle corruption, rigged elections and human rights abuses in return for more foreign investment.
AIDS CONTROVERSY
On Tuesday, U.S. President George Bush signed into law a plan to spend $15 billion over the next five years to fight AIDS in Africa and challenged Europe to match the commitment. Critics said the actual budget of Bush's plan fell far short of what was needed at a time when AIDS kills one person every 10 seconds.
Sub-Saharan Africa has the world's highest number of HIV-infected people, at more than 28 million, and most of them cannot afford expensive anti-viral treatments, even at the reduced prices that some pharmaceutical firms are offering.
The firms say they have played their part by cutting prices and it is now up to governments to help fund distribution and healthcare through the Global Fund for AIDS set up in 2001.
"It's not a question anymore of drug prices," said Jeffrey Sturchio, vice president of external affairs at U.S.-based Merck & Co Inc.
"What the politicians have to do now is decide whether they are going to carry through on the kinds of commitments they've made to provide resources, to enable developing countries to implement the programmes that they know will work."
To date, life-saving antiretroviral medicines have reached only a fraction of those in Africa that need them.
Industry figures show fewer than 36,000 Africans were receiving cut-price HIV/AIDS drugs at the end of March 2002 -- the latest period for which data is available -- representing just 0.01 percent of those infected on the continent.
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