Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-01-13-Speech-2-330"
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"en.20040113.14.2-330"2
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".
Madam President, Mrs Sandbæk referred to the unspent EDF money that could be used for this. The amount of commitments not yet spent on the budget part of our development cooperation is EUR 11 billion. For the EDF it is EUR 8 billion. We are now at a point where it takes the Commission and the Member States pretty much the same number of years to implement things. Today we are not slower, but we have a mountain of old decisions to implement. This is true for both budget and EDF areas. At the end of 2003 we found that we had reached a level of EDF spending of around EUR 2.5 billion: the highest ever, around 60% higher than the level when this Commission took office.
It was announced to Member States that they had better be prepared to pay up for the last quarter of that year so that we could deliver on this better performance. Unfortunately, however, some Member States did not pay their contributions, so we had to ask them to make up their minds as to whether they were serious about their wish for the Commission to perform better. The Commission is serious about that.
The TRIPS Agreement is being addressed by the Commission. We were pleased that it was possible, before Cancún, to have concluded this agreement, after waiting for the US since December of the year before. We are now in the process of working out how to implement this in terms of legislation. We look forward to doing this. We will give this a very high priority.
The money being committed by the Union, Member States and the Commission for the Global Fund is EUR 2.6 billion. All in all, the total amount pledged to the fund is EUR 4.8 billion. I agree with those who said that this is still not enough money, but it should be considered that our budget support for the health sector and even our general budget support makes it possible for our developing partner countries to increase the effort in basic health services.
The annual spending per capita on public health services in sub-Saharan Africa is somewhere between two and six dollars. So even with antiretrovirals becoming very inexpensive, the system to administer them and to make sure they are correctly handled is not there. I do not mean that we should give up on treatment, but I insist that prevention, to put it quite clearly, is the only cure in terms of HIV/AIDS. I would tend to agree with Mr Sacrédeus regarding lifestyle change, especially for men. This is why the whole agenda on reproductive and sexual health and rights is the key to getting it right on HIV/AIDS.
More people in Africa – especially children – die from malaria than HIV/AIDS. These are poverty- and ignorance-related diseases, so the whole link with fighting poverty and the challenge of meeting the millennium development goals makes a lot of sense.
I wholeheartedly thank Parliament for its cooperation and the backing that we have received. Let us continue to make this a team effort."@en1
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