Rich and poor nations must look beyond the humanitarian crisis that is HIV/AIDS and see that it will also devastate their economies, a report released yesterday says.
The report is a call to the international community to do more now to stop the global epidemic or "pay a lot more later," the authors of the TD Bank Financial Group write.
"Humanitarian causes should be enough of a rationale for action to fight AIDS, but they haven't been in this case," Don Drummond, senior vice-president and chief economist of TD Bank Financial Group, said in an interview. "It seems a little farther removed from [the developed world], so by having some harder numbers on it would help."
The report cites tremendous costs associated with the fight against AIDS, but says "many in the industrialized world have insulated themselves by thinking that the crisis in the developing world will have little effect on them. Ignorance will only increase the future price tag."
The difficulty lies in determining exactly what that price tag is. Past analyses on the cost of AIDS have attributed only a quarter- to a half-percentage-point loss in gross domestic product a year to AIDS in some sub-Saharan countries.
But, Mr. Drummond said, that cannot be the case when some of these countries are losing upward of 25 per cent of their labour force to HIV/AIDS. It is much more significant, with the impact of HIV in parts of sub-Saharan Africa "destroy[ing] the economic, social and political fabric of [some sub-Saharan] nations" within the next 15 to 20 years, Mr. Drummond said.
"What they don't capture is that most of the people being affected are younger than 30, and in their prime working years," he said. So these individuals in the early stages of HIV start by missing work occasionally, but as the disease progresses, they become too ill to work and are forced to leave the work force entirely. The labour cost is doubled, he says, after accounting for those family members who are forced to leave the work force to care for them.
In sub-Saharan Africa, 5 to 10 per cent of the labour force has already died of AIDS, and that number is expected to rise to 25 per cent in the next 15 years. This can be seen when 20 years ago, sub-Saharan Africa was a net exporter of agricultural products. They now have to import more of their agricultural products because of the diminished labour force.
The report also found that there has been a 20-per-cent drop in the number of children attending school in many African countries. With 15 million children around the world orphaned because of AIDS, they have lost their parents as teachers and role models, "the primary mechanism society uses for passing knowledge."
Michael O'Connor, executive director of the Ottawa-based Interagency Coalition on AIDS and Development, said the report could help bring needed attention to the issue of HIV/AIDS.
"Everybody reacts to different arguments, and some people need the hard-nosed economist perspective," he said. "If that's what it takes, then why not."
