Companies 'undermining global fight against HIV' 

Nick Mathiason
Sunday November 16, 2003
The Observer 

Big business takes the blame for exacerbating the worsening HIV crisis among the world's poorest countries in a new United Nations report published tomorrow. 
It found that 70 per cent of the world's largest transnational companies have no policies or programmes on HIV/Aids in the workplace. 
More seriously, the report, by the UN Research Institute for Social Development, suggests that multinationals have created the macro economic conditions that have allowed the virus to spread. 
Foreign direct investment has, it suggests, increased inequality and led to a flight of humanity to squalid cities, a process that allowed the deadly disease, now infecting more than 40 million people worldwide, to increase. 
The report says corporations are implicated in driving down commodity prices, which encourages over-production, and also in lobbying against individual governments' control of production. Servicing historic debt, much of it owed to private banks, has compromised poor countries' ability to organise decent healthcare systems. 
'The global response to HIV/Aids is dominated by a charity mentality,' said the author's report, Jem Bendell. 'Is the future health of humankind dependent on charity? That's rubbish. It is our savings, pensions, and shopping habits that fund companies which are, in some cases, undermining the ability of people in the poorest parts of the world to protect themselves from Aids. We should be looking at how to reshape the global economy to make it more supportive of global health.' 
The report concedes that projects such as the Global Coalition on HIV/Aids and the World Economic Forum are trying to engage the private sector. 

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/aids/story/0,7369,1085979,00.html]