Today's Date:

High-level meeting devoted to the fight against AIDS – Interview given by Xavier Darcos, Minister Delegate for Cooperation, Development and Francophony, to “France-Info”

London, March 9, 2005

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THE MINISTER – No, you can’t say that. Quite simply, initially, in 2000, the development of international action was entirely predictable. Today we can see that there are greater difficulties ahead of us than we thought we’d encounter just a few years ago, and so maybe we’ve got to reorganize. This is, moreover, what we’re going to do this year, 2005: there’s this meeting today, next week there’ll be a forum for replenishing the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM) taking place in Stockholm and, as you know, Britain, who will hold both the G8 and European Union presidencies in the second half of the year, is keen to put this issue of development – and thus AIDS – on the agenda of the G8 meeting. So I’d say that it’s a crucial moment pending this September’s United Nations session, which is going to consider the feasibility of achieving the Millennium Development Goals. It’s a crucial moment for us to see where we are and what we need, and to decide how to coordinate our policies.

THE MINISTER – First of all, clearly, we are seeking to identify national programmes. The problems aren’t identical in every country. They haven't all got the same education systems, they haven't got the same networks. So the aim is always not to try and establish a sort of absolute rule which would be applied in every country, but to encourage, in the worst affected countries, programmes we can finance. It isn't just a matter of raising funds. That’s very important, but if on one side you raise funds and on the other you've got a country which doesn't know how to, which can't on its own organize the distribution, for example, of generic antiretrovirals, obviously your help isn't effective. It's a difficulty we've come up against in previous years and want to combat.

THE MINISTER – We believe so, we’ve got a lot of evidence that it is. I believe that the money is being used effectively, but we also believe, and it's nevertheless one of the questions arising today, that we haven't got enough resources. We can clearly see that between now and 2007 we should be committing around $15 billion, when if we don't do more now, if we continue with the current fundraising we'll have $10 billion. So we have to find new methods of financing. This is why France, as you know, is maintaining the absolute necessity – because otherwise we won't succeed – of finding new taxes, new innovative financing sources by taxing kerosine, air transport, the arms trade, bank secrecy, stock market transactions, I don’t know what, that doesn’t matter, it's for the technical experts to tell us, it's their job, but we have to find new sources of financing./.