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Stop the Genocide in Africa!
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Again, the United States, the present President, by acting as I'm indicating now, could really ameliorate the situation significantly. The present President could take a position demanding the availability of adequate generics for every part of the world that needs it, based on medical need, no other requirement. He could also say that this genocide in Africa is going to stop, that the United States is going to rescind what is implicitly NSSM-200 of Kissinger. We are no longer going to be engaged in population control by methods of genocide, by methods of promoting civil war. We will not allow it. We will expose it. We will go to other countries to get concerts of action to stop this nonsense.
But in the long run, we have to give Africa justice. I've got this one chart, if we've still got it available to show, just to indicate what the problem is (Figure 9). Look, this is something we've worked on over the years. I've been working on this since 1975, essentially. You look at Africa as a whole, and say, “How can you deal with the problems of Africa?” Well, there's a lot of agricultural area in Africa, a lot of farmers. Now, if they didn't lose their food through disease and different kinds of problems, if they had adequate transportation, adequate technological assistance, adequate townships and centers which could provide this to the farmers, you would suddenly find that Africa would become a major net food-producing part of the world, in a fairly short period of time.
What does Africa need? What do we give Africa? We've got to give them what they don't get from any other source, from an inside source. What they need is basic economic infrastructure. So, I came up with my usual thing: Infrastructure--transportation, power, water--are the essentials. My view has been that the countries which are more prosperous should undertake an engineering project as a technology-transfer operation. That is, you actually employ Africans in a program which is done by Europeans, Americans, Chinese, and so forth.
So, you start building the necessary network of transportation, of water management, of power distribution, of creating new townships which are centers to service these farmers. Introduce methods for preservation of food. You can package it, we can use radioactive isotopes to purify packaged food, and save it. And by saving the food that is otherwise lost, by helping the farmers defend themselves against pests and so forth, you can suddenly transform Africa. Once you have created the economic infrastructure that implies, now you have a second dimension, the more essential dimension, against all disease. And the essential defense against all disease is to have an environmental control, a public health control, which is a major part of all disease control.
In the United States, we still have some semblance of public health. It's diminishing. In Africa, they have very little public health, almost none. For example, my wife and a friend, just on our last trip last in Calcutta, we had a general there who's a friend of mine, who came to a dinner we had with some people, and his wife was on an NGO that works on the question of HIV. So, my wife Helga and our friend Mary urdman], who was with us on this trip, went into East Delhi. Now, this is an area where people are being driven off agriculture by conditions in India, and are going to cities where there's no infrastructure for supporting them. Living under terrible conditions, and we've got some photographic evidence which my wife took with a camcorder, on what these conditions are, and talked with the people. This is typical of what is happening in Asia. We're talking about between 3 and 5% of the population being infected with HIV in Asia. It's deadly.
So, we have a worldwide problem of dealing with HIV, whose most acute expression, presently, is in southern Africa. We can deal with it. We should deal with it. The President, right now, President 43, should deal with it now! And say, “It stops! The generics are delivered. Period! The United States backs it.” Brazil has the capability of producing generics--our friends in Brazil, in the pharmaceutical sector. Brazil would be very happy to cooperate with the United States, in doing exactly that. The President should call President Lula, and say, “Let's get going.” And then ram it through here; and then move on these other needs of the care, and the infrastructure, the long-term needs.
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