Mozambican Health Minister Francisco Songane on Saturday said he knew nothing about any decision by the Brazilian government to renege on its promise to build a pharmaceutical plant in Mozambique to manufacture the anti- retroviral drugs that prolong the lives of AIDS sufferers.
On Thursday the Portuguese news agency Lusa said that the Brazilian government would no longer build the factory, and the story was picked up the following day by several of the Mozambican media.
Interviewed by Lusa, the newly appointed Coordinator of AIDS Programmes in the Brazilian Health Ministry, Pedro Chequer, declared "It's not worth building a factory making anti-retrovirals in Mozambique, for it to become a white elephant". Instead, Brazil was prepared to support quality control of drugs in Mozambique and to transfer technology, he said. Songane told Radio Mozambique on Saturday that the health ministry has received no information from the Brazilian government that it has changed its mind about a pledge that was given when Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva visited Mozambique last November.
He was "very surprised" by the report, and queried whether it represented an "official" Brazilian position.
"As long as we don't have any official document from the Brazilian authorities, we assume that what we agreed with them last year remains valid", Songane said.
He added that a Mozambican technical team is currently in Brazil studying the production of anti-retrovirals, and he believed they would not have gone if Brazil had really changed its mind about building the factory.
But the radio also contacted the Brazilian embassy - which essentially confirmed the Lusa story. The embassy said that Brazil was prepared to supply anti-retroviral drugs to other Portuguese-speaking countries, it would assist Mozambique in quality control, and it would transfer technology so that "later on" a factory might be built.
This is more or less what Chequer told Lusa, minus the sneer about "white elephants".
"Later" is not what President Lula and his delegation told their Mozambican counterparts in November. Lula himself publicly claimed that the plans for the factory would be ready by the end of 2003, and that construction could then start at any moment.
Over eight months after that promise there is no sign of either blueprints or construction.
How much later is "later" ? People are dying of AIDS in large numbers right now, and all the anti-retrovirals Mozambique uses are imported (mostly from India). There is no problem about a market for anti-retrovirals produced in Mozambique: if Mozambique cannot absorb the full production, the drugs can be exported to other southern African countries with high levels of HIV infection.
Fonte: AIM
