"The ministers came in with real-life experiences that show the challenges we face," Piot told reporters as the meeting wound up in the Zambian resort town of Livingstone, on the Victoria Falls.

"It is clear we are going into a new phase in the fight against AIDS," said Piot, the executive director of UNAIDS.

"Treatment is still very, very insufficient -- we need political mobilisation."

The United Nations says that some 900,000 AIDS sufferers worldwide are taking antiretroviral drugs, which can give them many years of useful life, but that only 100,000 of these are in sub-Saharan Africa, the epicentre of the disease, with 26.6 million HIV-positive residents out of a world total of 65 million.

The UN aim is to expand the number of those taking the drugs, needed only when the disease becomes relatively advanced, to three million people by 2005, a programme known as the 3x5 initiative.

Piot said that although a "new momentum" had emerged to provide funding, the amount of money available worldwide was still insufficient for treatment, for prevention, and for the care of millions of AIDS orphans.

South Africa, which turned down an invitation to participate in the meeting, has delayed rolling out antiretroviral drugs while setting up infrastructure around the country, a stand which has brought criticism from activists.

"If the question is whether we should wait for all that to be fixed, my answer is 'no'," said Piot.

Joy Phumaphi, the assistant director general of the UN World Health Organisation, earlier told delegates that more than 40 countries had applied to join the 3x5 initiative, which would in any case reach only half the people who needed treatment.

UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura said the aim of the meeting with the ministers of health, education and finance from Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe, was "to find better ways of working together".

But he warned: "Whatever else it may be, AIDS is a development disaster. AIDS is wiping out decades of investment in education and human development."

"Unfortunately, we have to recognise that we are falling behind," Matsuura said.

"Since there is no vaccine and no cure, and scaled-up treatments are only now becoming available, prevention remains vital if the spread of the epidemic is to be curtailed. But we have not been able to address the issue of prevention in a way that takes hold."

Matsuura said the problems of AIDS were long-standing, "but there is now a new urgency".

Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa, who opened the meeting, said his government was committed to providing "all the political will that is necessary," but he pointed out that 70 percent of people in southern Africa live below the poverty line, making it difficult for governments to raise funds to fight the disease.

"The epidemic (in southern and eastern Africa) has reached a stage where death is visibly and viscerally felt," said a background paper prepared for the conference, pointing out that prevalence rates approaching 40 percent of adults in some countries and 60 percent in those countries' worst-hit regions.

"We stand at a critical crossroads with a devastating triple-threat of HIV/AIDS, weakened capacity for governance, and hunger on the one hand, and an enormous opportunity to channel national, regional and international resources and capacity to reverse the epidemic on the other."

It said the epidemic was "hollowing out" governments' capacity to deliver services, with vacancies in the civil service at critical levels.

Another background paper warned that "top-down" education would not work, saying: "there is probably no issue that depends as much on being embedded in the cultural realities of place and community as teaching and learning about HIV/AIDS."

TERRA.WIRE