World Bank Calls For Better Donor Coordination And More Money To Battle Malaria

Health ministers, development agencies and experts on anti-malarial drugs opened a two-day World Bank conference in Paris on Thursday aimed at improving fund-raising to fight malaria, a disease that kills over a million people worldwide each year, mainly in Africa, reports The Associated Press.

"Every 30 seconds, one child in Africa dies of malaria," World Bank Senior Vice President Jean Louis Sarbib in Paris. He said the blood parasite slowed economic growth in African countries by around 1.3 percent each year. The disease costs the continent around $12 billion annually. Experts at the first meeting organized by the World Bank since the launch of its Booster Program for Malaria Control in April said that, unlike AIDS, malaria is a curable disease that has been eradicated in richer parts of the world.

The meeting aims to work on finding global subsidies for a new medicine, Artesiminin-based Combination Therapy or ACT, which reportedly costs 10 to 20 times more than previous treatments. "For people who live on one dollar a day, it's impossible to pay for treatment that costs one to two dollars per day," Sarbib said. Chloroquine, which is no longer effective at treating malaria, costs only 10 US cents a day. Experts worry that growing drug resistance in Africa and Asia may be contributing to a rise in cases and deaths. The World Health Organization this week advised countries to use the new malaria medicine responsibly to prevent people from developing resistance.

The Mail and Guardian online (South Africa) reports that with 500 million cases of malaria reported in Africa each year, the World Bank is concentrating its anti-malaria project on 17 African countries that have expressed an active interest in fighting the disease. The Bank is calling for an increase in supplies of mosquito nets treated with insecticide for poor families and better access to new anti-malarial medicines. The Bank also says international efforts needed to be coordinated better, under the leadership of African governments.

An estimated $2 billion is needed annually to half the worldwide burden of malaria by 2010, said Gobind Nankani, Vice President of the Africa Region at the World Bank. The World Bank has pledged an annual contribution of $200 million for the next three years, Nankani said. Worldwide annual investment in fighting malaria has shot up from $60 million in 1998 to roughly $600 million in 2004, but over 3 billion people still live under the threat of malaria worldwide, the WHO says.

The Voice of America Press further writes that Sarbib says the summit is not aimed at getting specific funding commitments, but, rather, at building up a momentum to fight malaria -- with a hope that the dollars to help do so will follow. Experts are also expected to discuss ways to make available effective-but-expensive anti-malarial drugs which most Africans are unable to afford. "I think there has been a very sad story that malaria is essentially a disease of poor people," Sarbib said. "There hasn't been much voice and much pressure, especially outside of poor communities, outside of Africa, to raise the profile of this disease." But that is changing. Sarbib points to July's G8 summit in Scotland, gathering the leaders of industrialized nations. They made a commitment to tackle malaria as part of an overall goal to help Africa.

Libération (France) adds that the priority is to provide Africa with access to ACT. According to the Bank, ACT should be recognized as a “global public good,” and in this capacity be subsidized by the international community. Sarbib is quoted as saying in an interview with the French daily that “the international community has to mobilize and provide incentives to pharmaceutical companies to do more. If demand is higher, so is production, and prices should go down. But this will not be enough, hence the need for subsidies.

When asked why African leaders are only now realizing the dangers of malaria, Sarbib answers: “In Africa, response capabilities are limited. Over the last couple of years, African leaders have been mobilized over AIDS, with the support of rich countries. They are now realizing that there are no long-term solutions for AIDS, while there are effective ways to fight malaria. On top of this, a change in generation is occurring in the pool of African economic leaders. The Leaders currently coming to power understand that a healthy and well educated population can contribute to growth. To meet this newfound determination, we must provide financing. Hence our mobilization today.”

Finance Ministers Launch Global Vaccine Fund To Tackle Diseases Of The Poor

Finance ministers from France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the UK will Friday launch a long-awaited International Finance Facility for Immunization (IFFIM) in London. The innovative fund will provide an extra $4 billion for the Global Alliance for Vaccine and Immunization (GAVI), an alliance between the public and private sector, in the next decade, reports The Financial Times.

The countries will borrow the money on capital markets and pay it back from aid budgets in an approach seen by some as a way of releasing aid money early. The extra resources will be used to finance immunization and buy vaccines for the developing world to tackle diseases such as polio and hepatitis B. The UK has pledged 35 percent of the money, some $130 million a year, with France contributing 25 percent. Italy, Spain and Sweden will announce their contributions Friday.

The New York Times further reports that the World Health Organization estimates this undertaking will save the lives of five million children over the next decade. The new funds would roughly double the resources of the Global Alliance. The alliance's board has already approved ambitious programs for 2006 to expand measles coverage in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as to help eradicate polio worldwide and increase the use of maternal and neonatal tetanus vaccines. These plans can go forward now that the new financing has been secured. However, the United States has declined to join the vaccine plan. Bush administration officials said earlier this year that the long-term commitment to raise money through the bond market is not consistent with the annual appropriations process in Congress. The United States provides $60 million to $70 million a year to the alliance.

The Independent (UK) adds that the money will finance immunization schemes in 72 countries in an attempt to eradicate lethal diseases including polio, hepatitis B, measles, diphtheria, yellow fever and tetanus. Ten million children die every year from preventable diseases and 30 million go without immunization. Illnesses from such diseases make up more than half of all those in the poorest countries " nine times the level in the richest nations.

The New York Times further adds the pact marks the first time rich nations have used pledges of increased aid to back government bonds as a means of financing a major development program. This so-called international finance facility is the brainchild of Gordon Brown, Britain's chancellor of the exchequer. The money will be used to purchase vaccines and bicycles to transport them, as well as to rehabilitate health clinics and pay health workers to do the immunizing in remote areas. Leaders of the alliance hope the vaccine plan will strengthen basic health services in poor countries, not just immunization efforts.

Gordon Brown, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Graça Machel, the chair of the Vaccine Fund Board, meanwhile write in an opinion piece in The Independent (UK) that by matching the power of medical advance with an innovative facility to front-load long-term finance, the IFFIM will enable Gavi to invest in the introduction of new and underused vaccines, including combination vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, hepatitis B and the establishment of a post- eradiction polio stockpile. It is not just the increased resources the IFFIM generates that makes this possible, but the way in which they are provided. First, it will make additional resources available sooner. By advancing aid now the facility will allow investment to strengthen immunization systems today " when it is most needed. Second, by delivering predictable and stable aid, IFFIM provides the certainty manufacturers need to invest in new and under-used vaccines and accelerate the reduction in vaccine prices. Backing this up is new work led by Italy’s Finance Minister, Domenico Siniscalco, to investigate creative ways of incentivizing research to find and produce vaccines. 

BBC News Online reports that critics fear the scheme, first championed by the chancellor in 2003, is a "buy now, pay later" project. Peter Hardstaff, from the World Development Movement, said he wanted to increase funds for immunization but did not approve of the details of the scheme. "Our concern is that because the IFF is a way of borrowing money from international financial markets, in years to come we're going to end up using aid money to pay off the interest to financiers rather than helping the poor," he said. Hardstaff argued it would be better for the schemes to be funded from ordinary government revenue.

In other news, The Financial Times writes that a report from the London School of Economics and commissioned by the Wellcome Trust, the London-based medical charity, says stronger incentives to smaller biomedical companies rather than to large pharmaceutical groups could help boost the development of treatments for "neglected" diseases of the developing world such as malaria and tuberculosis. Fresh finance and help for small companies in winning approval from the regulatory authorities of developing countries could create profitable markets to provide medicines for poorer countries that are more sustainable than the existing philanthropic system.

The Economist further writes that public-private partnerships in the medical field serve to co-ordinate contributions from companies and academic centers, manage R&D portfolios and, crucially, raise money to fund the entire enterprise from sources such as charitable foundations. This means that big drug makers can shift much of the cost of R&D—particularly the risky business of clinical trials in developing countries—to the partnerships, leaving them to concentrate on the less costly business of early-stage research. So, although they may have little expectation of big profits, the firms are managing to limit their costs.

UN Summit Talks Accept Key US Anti-Poverty Proposal

With little time left before next week's UN summit, negotiators accepted a US compromise on development during divisive talks on a document world leaders could support, Reuters reports delegates said on Thursday.

The new language, tentatively accepted by a negotiating group of 32 ambassadors, would "ensure the timely and full realization of the development goals and objectives that emerged from the major United Nations conferences and summits, including those agreed at the Millennium Summit that have been known as the Millennium Development Goals..." US Ambassador John Bolton submitted the compromise on Tuesday during marathon negotiations after criticism mounted against the US position. "It's a very good development," said Pakistani Ambassador Munir Akram. But he said differences still remained on agreeing a goal for rich nations to pay 0.7 percent of their gross national product for foreign aid.

The Associated Press meanwhile reports that UN members were deeply divided Thursday over proposals for an urgent overhaul of United Nations management. After Thursday's closed-door session on management reforms, Britain's UN Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry said the negotiation was at a standstill. China's deputy ambassador Zhang Yishan agreed that there was no movement, adding "it's difficult." There is widespread agreement among the 191 UN member states that there is a need for management reforms in the UN Secretariat, which is headed by Annan. But there is a deep division, mainly between developed and developing nations, on whether the secretary-general should get more power at the expense of the General Assembly which controls the UN budget and oversees most management decisions. "Management reform is difficult for the simple reason that there are fundamental differences on what is flexibility, what is accountability, how much flexibility there should be and above all whether it encroaches on the ultimate authority of the General Assembly or not," said India's UN Ambassador Nirupam Sen.

In a separate piece The Associated Press meanwhile writes that in interviews last week and on Thursday, Undersecretary-General Ibrahim Gambari did a tour of the globe, talking about hotspots likely to be high on the agenda of the heads of state and government and their foreign ministers, who will stay on for the General Assembly's ministerial meeting from Sept. 17-28. Africa's problems take up about 60 percent of the Security Council's time, and they include not only conflict but hunger and bad governance.

Reuters meanwhile reports that UN demographers reported on Thursday that the world's poorest countries would help raise their standard of living and give a boost to global efforts to fight poverty by reducing their fertility rates. While fertility has generally plummeting in developed nations, most poor countries are characterized by high fertility rates, according to a new report by the UN Population Division. Because of the divergence, the 50 least developed countries -- most of which are in sub-Saharan Africa -- today account for 12 percent of the world population but are expected to account for a quarter of the world's population growth between 2005 and 2015, the report said. By contrast, the total world population of about 6.5 billion people, is growing by about 1.2 percent a year, it said.

The Economist further writes that Martin Ravallion and his colleagues at the World Bank put the international poverty line at $1.08 per day, measured in 1993 purchasing-power parity dollars. They estimate that in 2001, 1.1 billion people fell short of this line, by $113 on average. Giving $113 a year to 1.1 billion people would cost $124 billion. As [Jeffrey] Sachs points out, this is little more than 0.6 percent of the combined GDP of the OECD's 22 donor countries, measured in the same purchasing-power parity dollars. Thus the promise to devote 0.7 percent of GDP to fighting poverty has a theoretical rationale today that it did not have when first proposed in 1970. With an aid budget that size, the “poverty gap” could in principle be filled.

IMF To Debate Zimbabwe Expulsion

International Monetary Fund (IMF) officials meet on Friday to decide whether to expel Zimbabwe because of unpaid debts, BBC News online reports.

Zimbabwe has been in arrears with the IMF since February 2001 because it failed to pay interest on the $4.5 billion it has borrowed from the Fund. Last month, it unexpectedly repaid $120 million, but it still needs to find nearly $175 million more to avoid expulsion. An IMF delegation returned to Washington from Harare on Friday last week after assessing progress made by President Robert Mugabe's government. The delegation's report will form the basis of the IMF's decision on whether or not to expel Zimbabwe from the fund. If the IMF expels Zimbabwe, it will make it more difficult for the country to borrow money in the future from both private and public lenders. And it would not be eligible for IMF loans which aim to help countries in temporary economic difficulties - at the price of adherence to strict economic conditions.

Zimbabwe's Finance Minister Herbert Murerwa denied reports in South Africa's Business Day newspaper that he and Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono intended to visit Washington to present the meeting with a $50 million check. "We have already paid $120 million and that's all for the time being," he said. "We have paid a significant amount of the loan and we will not be making any payments now." Murerwa said Zimbabwe had done its best to avoid expulsion and would be addressing the outstanding arrears.

The Associated Press further reports that the "compulsory withdrawal" of Zimbabwe from the IMF would also be due to its government’s refusal to implement restructuring measures and cap spending. If the executive board decides to recommend expulsion, a vote by the full board of governors could take place at its annual meeting later this month. Continued IMF membership is unlikely to lift Zimbabwe out of its economic woes, analysts say. But the country's increasingly isolated leader would consider it a coup against his many local and international critics if the IMF agrees to let Zimbabwe remain a member. Zimbabwe has appealed to its neighbor, South Africa, for help meeting the rest of its IMF obligations. Zimbabwe has also devalued its currency, relaxed the state monopoly on critical fuel and grain imports, and increased gas and diesel prices to more realistic levels. Analysts expressed surprise at the government's sudden willingness to take steps it has resisted for years.

The Economist writes that whether or not the $120 million are enough to reverse the automatic expulsion process, it may persuade the IMF board to postpone a final decision for another six months. While the payment may make life even more miserable for ordinary Zimbabweans, it may give Mugabe further means to go on ignoring foreign pressure. The government made the IMF payment by mopping up just enough foreign exchange from local exporters. Mugabe’s government made the last-minute effort to find the money itself in order to avoid having to rely on South Africa to tide it over. President Thabo Mbeki looked as if he would come to his neighbor's rescue once again, with a loan; but this time it would have had strings attached, marking a distinct shift in policy. Mugabe's efforts to find money elsewhere seem to have largely failed. His recent trip to China has not produced the cash he had hoped for. Mugabe's “look-East” policy is unlikely to bring the investment so badly needed.

The Associated Press meanwhile reports that Zimbabwe's once prosperous economy has plummeted since 2000 when Mugabe's government began seizing thousands of white-owned commercial farms for redistribution to blacks in an often violent campaign. More than 70 percent of Zimbabweans are unemployed, and an estimated 4 million will run out of food before the next harvest. Most now survive off the informal economy, but police arrested and confiscated the goods of tens of thousands of vendors during a recent slum clearance campaign. The country is plagued by shortages of foreign currency, fuel, medicines and other key imports.

Katrina Rings Alarms On Climate Change: World Bank

Hurricane Katrina may serve as a wake-up call on climate change for developing nations, many of which are vulnerable to devastation from global warming, Ian Johnson, the World Bank's vice president for environmentally and socially sustainable development, said on Thursday, reports Reuters.

Johnson said the storm's heavy damage in the southern United States would have important implications for poorer countries. "Just think of the catastrophic impact it's had in a country that's pretty well organized, pretty rich. Transfer that to a country that isn't and may not have the same level of capacity to deal with these sorts of things," Johnson said. "Katrina is a terrible tragedy, but maybe it is a wake-up call to all of us to begin understanding what catastrophic events, what damage can occur.”

In addition to fostering talks on emissions and promoting clean energy products, Johnson said the World Bank is working with private industry to find ways to protect poor nations from the expected environmental shifts linked to global warming. In order to protect vulnerable regions, such as low-lying areas and those subject to landslides, Johnson said the World Bank was seeking to spur investment in flood controls and levees and to encourage stricter building standards. Other ideas include greater reliance on water-resistant or drought-resistant crops to maintain agricultural productivity should weather patterns change, he said, adding new insurance products could also help those who would otherwise lose everything in a disaster.

While poor people in the New Orleans area were among the most affected in Katrina's wake, Johnson said it was not the World Bank's role to lend assistance to the United States or other wealthy developed economies facing environmental risks. Still, he said it was important to draw lessons from the United States' experience with the storm and its aftermath. "It is the poor who suffer disproportionately in these events because they tend to be the least capable of resisting, they're not as resilient, they are typically located and live in the areas that are most vulnerable," he said.

Also in this edition: Wolfowitz Says Fighting Corruption Essential In Africa; Rights and wrongs -- Big oil versus Amnesty International; Plan by 13 Nations Urges Open Technology Standards; Developing Countries See The Point Of Higher Education

Wolfowitz Says Fighting Corruption Essential In Africa.Describing corruption as a critical disease, World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz said Thursday that developing countries in Africa and elsewhere must control it in order to develop their economies and improve their citizens' lives, reports The Associated Press.

He said developed countries had a moral obligation to help poor countries recover assets stolen through corruption. Whether it's in the private sector, government or aid projects, Wolfowitz said "for every bribe taker there is a bribe giver. Engaging in these practices undermines efforts to combat corruption."

He welcomed an agreement last month under which Switzerland will return to Nigeria almost $500 million stolen by the late military dictator Sani Abacha. The money, which has been frozen in Swiss accounts, was of criminal origin, the Swiss Justice Ministry said. Wolfowitz said the World Bank will work with Nigeria to determine how best to use these funds.

Wolfowitz took over as head of the 184-nation lending institution June 1, made a trip to four African countries that month and has named Africa a development priority for the Bank. Wolfowitz said on this trip and in talks with African leaders that he has found a "refreshing willingness to address" corruption and to take action to stamp it out. He also said the World Bank was adopting an Africa Action Plan that the Bank's 24 board members discussed at a meeting this week. The plan has 25 initiatives in three broad areas: building capable states and improving government; strengthening the drivers of growth, which are a vibrant private sector, expanded exports, infrastructure investment and increased agriculture productivity as well as investments in education and health; and increasing the impact of partnerships among governments, donor countries and development agencies.

Rights and wrongs -- Big oil versus Amnesty International. In a new report, “Contracting Out of Human Rights”, Amnesty International has taken aim at a consortium involving two American oil giants, Exxon Mobil and Chevron, and Petronas of Malaysia, that is extracting oil in Chad and pumping it to the Cameroon coast via a 665-mile pipeline, writes The Economist.

Amnesty is not (yet) accusing the consortium of any specific human-rights abuses in the Chad-Cameroon project (though protesters against it have been abused in government crackdowns). Instead, its report focuses on the potential harm that may be done, as a result of the contracts governing the deal. At the heart of these contracts is a “stabilization of law” clause, under which the consortium will be compensated for any economic harm caused to it by changes in the legal regimes governing the project. The appeal of such a clause to the oil firms is obvious, given the long history of unscrupulous governments ripping off foreign investors, writes the weekly. But, argues Amnesty, one effect of the clause may be to impose a financial penalty on any government that tries to improve human rights by, for example, requiring higher minimum safety standards or quicker redress for lost land.

This risk may well be overstated, suggests The Economist. Exxon and its peers insist they would not seek compensation for changes that genuinely sought to improve human rights. On the other hand, after an earlier report by Amnesty on the equally controversial Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, a consortium led by BP agreed to add a “human-rights undertaking” to its contracts with the governments of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. Ideally, such undertakings will become a standard feature of contracts between international investors and governments.

Plan by 13 Nations Urges Open Technology Standards. In a report to be presented at the World Bank today, a group that includes senior government officials from 13 countries will urge nations to adopt open-information technology standards as a vital step to accelerate economic growth, efficiency and innovation, reports The New York Times. The 33-page report is a road map for creating national policies on open technology standards, and comes at a time when several countries -- and some state governments -- are pursuing plans to reduce their dependence on proprietary software makers, notably Microsoft, by using more free, open-source software.

The project, begun by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School, gathered government officials from China, India, Thailand, Denmark, Jordan, Brazil and elsewhere at a three-day meeting in Silicon Valley in February to discuss technology standards and economic development. The meeting was followed by e-mail exchanges, conference calls and postings on a shared Web site.

At the World Bank, the interest in open standards mostly involves using them as a tool to help stimulate economic growth in developing countries. ''If you're using technology to alleviate poverty, then openness is a compelling alternative,'' said David Satola, a senior counsel at the World Bank. ''There are key elements in this report that could be used to shape national policies on technology standards.''

Developing Countries See The Point Of Higher Education. Across the developing world, higher education is coming in from the cold. Gone are the days when it was purely a luxury for the elite. Governments are rapidly expanding their higher-education systems, with China probably witnessing the biggest expansion of student numbers in history. They are trying to create centers of excellence and throwing open the sector to private entrepreneur, writes The Economist.

The main reason for this flurry of activity is the dramatic growth in the supply of potential students. Secondary school enrolment rates have grown rapidly across the developing world. But there has also been a revolution in economic thinking. Not so long ago the World Bank pooh-poohed spending on higher education as both economically inefficient and socially regressive. Now many development economists are warming to higher education, pointing to the demand for graduates—as demonstrated by their wage premium—and to the positive effect of university-based research on the economy.

Public spending on universities in developing countries is highly regressive. In Latin America the professional classes, who account for 15 percent of the population, take up nearly half of all university places. In Rwanda, 15 percent of the total education budget is spent on the 0.2 percent of students who attend universities. Most universities in the developing world are also hopelessly badly managed.

But there are a few bright spots on the horizon. Some universities in poorer countries have been doing world-class research. A second bright spot is that good management can produce striking improvements. A third cause for cheer is the proliferation of different kinds of universities. A few years ago most universities in the developing world were much the same: designed for the elite and dominated by the state. Now there is more variety. The biggest change is the emergence of a for-profit sector that concentrates on subjects such as accounting and computer skills, and often pioneers educational innovation.

Briefly Noted…Dow Jones reports Chad's cash-strapped government has banned cabinet ministers from traveling abroad and asked senior officials to waive salary increases in an effort to qualify for debt relief, officials said Thursday. The cost-cutting measures come after a series of crippling strikes that were triggered by the government's failure to pay salaries, pensions and students' allowances on time. The ministers for finance, foreign affairs and economic planning are exempted from the travel ban, said Finance Minister Abbas Mahamat Tolli. The government has also cut allowances paid to cabinet ministers, members of parliament and other officials for the rest of the year in an effort to meet conditions set out to qualify for debt relief under a joint World Bank and International Monetary Fund initiative, Tolli said.

Agence France Presse notes a meeting of donor countries on Burundi will be held next Tuesday in New York, aimed at helping the country continue its emergence from bloody conflict, UN and Burundian officials said Thursday. It will be attended by UN chief Kofi Annan, the nine heads of state of an African regional grouping and ministers from western countries, said Carolyn McAskie, head of the UN operation in Burundi.

Reuters reports that HIV/AIDS has decimated Africa's farming communities so badly that the amount of cultivated land in some countries has declined by nearly 70 percent, researchers said on Thursday. About 80 percent of Africans derive their living from agriculture but the illness, which has infected more than 25 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, has left fewer and fewer people able to till the soil. "African agriculture depends on labor. You can't produce crops if there is nobody to work on the farms," said Annmarie Kormawa, of the System-Wide Initiative for HIV/AIDS and Agriculture (SWIHA).

Kyodo (Japan) notes that Pacific Rim finance ministers ended a two-day meeting Friday, calling for greater exchange rate flexibility in the region to address global current-account imbalances and increased policy coordination between oil producers and consumers to rein in soaring crude oil prices. While welcoming recent steps by China and Malaysia to scrap their fixed currency systems, finance ministers from the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum said ''some economies'' should seek ''greater exchange rate flexibility,'' according to a joint statement issued after their talks on the South Korean resort island of Jeju. The message is taken as a call on China to let the yuan's value rise to pursue greater flexibility in the country's exchange rate system over time, as requested by the United States and other Group of Seven nations.

Reuters reports the United States wants a textile trade agreement with China but will not sacrifice its right to restrict imports of Chinese clothing when there is a surge, the chief U.S. trade negotiator said on Thursday. The United States wants to negotiate a comprehensive agreement governing clothing imports from China through the end of 2008, when the safeguard measure expires. Beijing favors a shorter pact, covering less product categories.

Interfax notes the Russian government has decided to double its donations to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria for the period from 2005 to 2008, and to pay an extra $20 million to the fund in this period, Russian Ambassador to Britain Yury Fedotov said on Tuesday. Russia has the status of a donor and recipient at the GFATM simultaneously.

The Guardian (UK) writes that key rebuilding projects in Iraq are grinding to a halt because American money is running out and security has diverted funds intended for electricity, water and sanitation, according to US officials. Plans to overhaul the country's infrastructure have been downsized, postponed or abandoned because the $24bn budget approved by Congress has been dwarfed by the scale of the task. Water and sanitation have been particularly badly hit. According to a report published this week by Government Accountability Office, the investigative branch of Congress, $2.6bn has been spent on water projects, half the original budget, after the rest was diverted to security and other uses.

Reuters notes the United Nations said it refused to start printing Iraq's draft constitution on Thursday, delaying yet again efforts to get millions of copies to voters before a referendum now fixed for Oct. 15. One negotiator from the Sunni Arab minority which has been lobbying for changes to the text adopted by parliament on Aug. 28 said non-Arab Kurdish leaders agreed to an amendment to the draft to strengthen wording on Iraq's nature as an Arab state.

Reuters reports a United Nations inquiry into former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri's assassination will need 40 more days to finish, the chief investigator told Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Thursday. The inquiry had been due to finish by next Thursday but Detlev Mehlis, the veteran German prosecutor leading the probe, asked for the extra time during a meeting with Annan at UN headquarters, UN officials said. Annan planned to relay that request on Friday to the UN Security Council, which authorized the international investigation into the Feb. 14 Beirut bomb attack that killed Hariri, the officials said.

Afghanistan still faces an election funding shortfall of $4.6 million ahead of the September 18 vote but it will not jeopardize the polls, the United Nations said on Thursday, notes Agence France Presse. "The gap has now closed to $4.6 million," UN spokesman Adrian Edwards told reporters. "It will not jeopardize the elections. At this time what we are mainly talking about is the need to (promptly) pay bills and settle accounts." The total cost of the Afghan parliamentary elections, which are being financed by the international community, is 148.6 million dollars.

Reuters notes French Finance Minister Thierry Breton said on Thursday he wants the European Union to push for a renegotiation of the World Trade Organization’s multilateral accord on public procurement. He said US small and medium-sized businesses had an advantage in this sector because they won a derogation in the accord while there was no equivalent for European companies. Breton said small and medium-sized firms in the United States benefited from the Small Business Act which predated the signing of the accord and which the United States was allowed to keep in place.