Southern Africa should treat AIDS as a political, social and economic crisis because it is killing off people crucial to its development, Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika said on Monday.
Almost two-thirds of the world’s HIV/AIDS sufferers -- or 25 million people -- live in sub-Saharan Africa, while the southern African nations of Botswana and Swaziland have the highest prevalence rates, above 35 percent.
Mutharika, who was elected earlier this year, told an annual summit of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) that the region was losing professionals and officials at a rate faster than replacements could be trained.
“We continue to lose prominent politicians and members of parliament to the AIDS pandemic,” he said.
More resources needed
Some countries, like sparsely populated Botswana, are pulling out all the stops to halt the spread of the epidemic while others are doing relatively little. South Africa launched its first program to distribute life-prolonging antiretroviral drugs early in 2004.
In speeches at the start of the two-day summit, other leaders and top SADC officials urged action to help the region overcome food shortages partly caused by perennial droughts, and put more resources into fighting the HIV-AIDS epidemic.
Prema Ramsamy, who heads the 13-nation political and economic group, said that although cereal production in SADC was 10 percent higher this year at 24.97 million tons, about 5.4 million people in the region still needed food aid.
Ramsamy said SADC had re-organized its secretariat -- which coordinates programs and activities -- in the past four years to help it spearhead regional development better, but it still needed more resources.
SADC’s new chairman, Mauritian Prime Minister Paul Berenger, said that while the group had become a credible organ for economic development, it needed to sharpen its capacity to interact with and win concessions from other countries.
“Our commitment to the region should therefore be at par with our engagement in the multilateral trading system if we are to reform it to our advantage and benefit from trade opportunities,” he said.
Berenger said that as SADC chairman he would try to increase “cooperating partners” for SADC -- which has mostly relied on Western aid -- to include China and India.
