by Michael F. Flach
ABC News reported recently that the death toll from the AIDS epidemic in Africa has reached 25 million. Millions of children have been orphaned. Despite these staggering numbers, the top foreign aid priority of the U.S. government on the continent remains reducing the birth rate under the guise of family planning, said Steven W. Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute (PRI).
“The AIDS crisis in Africa is putting more and more children at risk,” he said. “Either their parents are too sick to care for them, or they have already been left orphans. Yet the U.S. Agency for International Development routinely spends more money to prevent children from being born through the aggressive promotion of sterilization, IUDs, Norplant, Depo-Provera, and the Pill, than to care for already born children who are orphaned, homeless, sick or hungry.”
• In Tanzania, according to the latest figures from USAID, only $2.5 million will be spent on child survival and other health programs in 2001, and none at all on displaced children and orphanages. Yet twice that amount, or $5 million, will be spent on population control.
• In Uganda, only $2.8 million is budgeted for child survival and other health programs, while a full $7 million is budgeted for population control. Orphanages and displaced children will receive nothing.
“Given this all consuming emphasis on population control, it is perhaps no surprise that little real development has occurred in Africa, despite the billions of dollars in aid spent there since USAID came into existence in 1961,” Mosher said.
“Indeed, this emphasis on population control has itself caused problems, notably by undermining the primary health care system.”
Dr. Kevin DeCock, director of the Kenyan field office of the Centers for Disease Control, suggested at an international AIDS conference last month that, given the poor state of primary health care in Africa, a “reinvestment in Africa's public health system and basic infrastructure will be necessary before efforts to combat AIDS can make a substantial difference.”
“Perhaps if, over the past 30 years, African ministries of health had not been pushed to focus exclusively on population control, there might be more health infrastructure in place to cope with the AIDS' crisis,” Mosher said. “It is not too late to start.”
(This article courtesy of the Arlington Catholic Herald.)
