BANGKOK, (AFP) – The crisis over funding the global fight against AIDS emerged as a key issue at the world AIDS forum yesterday, as activists demanded billions more dollars for prevention and treatment and held wealthy nations accountable for the pandemic.

Experts said the bill for treatment and prevention of the worst health crisis of modern times would be “extremely expensive” and governments, civil society and the private sector needed to put up much more than had already been offered.

“The world stands now at a point of the launch of massive scale-up” of prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS, but “it will be extremely expensive”, said Richard Feachem, the director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Jean-Francois Richard, the World Bank vice president for Europe, said the international community was “very slow and inefficient” in solving problems such as the AIDS crisis.

He said the cost could run beyond the $20 billion a year estimated by the United Nations AIDS agency to be needed by 2007.

“We are far away from that number (of raising $20 billion a year), and we’re far away from rebuilding the health systems in the world,” he said.

Countries currently spend $900 billion a year on the military and $350 billion on farm subsidies, he said.

“The world has a lot of spending that could be diverted to the global issues, one of which happens to be AIDS. The money is there, what we don’t have is the will by nation states.”

Several dozen protestors meanwhile stormed the conference and threw mock blood over posters of world leaders including US President George W Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in protest over a shortfall in funding to tackle the epidemic.

They said the Group of Seven wealthiest nations, which also includes France, Italy, Germany and Canada, had failed to live up to their commitments to provide $10 billion a year to the Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS.

“Each of the countries is in breach of their 2001 promise,” Khalil Elouardighi of Act-UP Paris told reporters after the demonstration.

The G7 “collectively share responsibility for the needless deaths of countless thousands because of their inaction,” the activists said in a statement, and in a mock trial they found the leaders “guilty of mass murder”.

The United States is the largest contributor to the global AIDS fight, pledging $15 billion over five years in Bush’s AIDS programme.

But US professor and legal expert on HIV/AIDS Brook Baker, of the Northeastern University School of Law, said the US – as the world’s richest country – was obligated to do far more.

“Their fare share is more like $30 billion over five years,” said Baker, adding that the US entered a “silent conspiracy” with other wealthy nations not to carry the proportionate burden.

Investment to confront the AIDS threat also had to increase sharply in the world’s most populous continent Asia which is experiencing a surge in new HIV infections, experts said.

A study by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and UNAIDS of the Asia-Pacific region estimated that by 2007, $5.1 billion would be needed for treatment and prevention there.

Kim Hak-Su, executive secretary of the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, said: “National leaders must change their budgeting priorities while there’s still time to stop a rapid escalation of the cost of care.”