[Ip-health] News: AIDS Ravages Generation of African Farmers (Reuters)

[Kate Krauss]

AIDS Ravages Generation of African Farmers
Thu Feb 21,10:26 AM ET

By David Brough 

ROME (Reuters) - AIDS is ravaging an entire generation of farm workers as it
sweeps through rural Africa, the president of a United Nations development
agency said. 

"AIDS is devastating rural life in many parts of Africa. You have a
disappearing generation," Lennard Bage, head of the Rome-based UN
International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), told Reuters late on
Wednesday. 

The United Nations has said that, in Africa's 25 worst affected countries, 7
million agricultural workers have died from AIDS since 1985 and 16 million
more could die by 2020.

"AIDS is taking a tremendous toll. By now most people with AIDS are living
in the rural areas," he added, speaking on the sidelines of his agency's
annual meeting. 

He said AIDS was depriving the countryside of the labour force to provide
food for the hungry, severely hindering the continent's efforts to achieve a
UN goal to halve hunger and poverty by 2015.

"It means a lack of manpower," he said, adding the disease had left more
than 12 million AIDS orphans in Africa.

According to the World Bank, the average annual loss in gross domestic
product per capita due to HIV/AIDS is around one percentage point in Africa.

"It is a tremendous obstacle," he said. "This has taken back standards of
living and average life expectancy. It is straight against the development
that we would like to see."

Africa, with about 10% of the world's population, accounts for 9 out of
every 10 new cases of HIV infection.

Some 83% of all AIDS-related deaths have occurred in Africa, the United
Nations reports. Sub-Saharan Africa is hardest hit, with 28.1 million people
infected. 

At the IFAD meeting, Swaziland's Farm Minister Roy Fanourakis said some
hospitals were telling patients they had AIDS-related diseases such as
tuberculosis without informing them it was because they had AIDS.

So when they went back home they were treated for their specific illness but
carried on risky sexual practices, spreading the AIDS virus further.

But Bage said successful prevention campaigns, such as that seen in Uganda,
offered some hope for the future.