[LINK] Nolen on Swaziland's HIV/AIDS epidemic

[rfmcdonald]

In today's issue of The Globe and Mail, journalist and author Stephanie Nolen has two disturbing articles about the severe HIV/AIDS epiemic in the landlocked southern African kingdom of Swaziland.

* "Where have all the Swazis gone?".

Solomon Dlamini decided the numbers were wrong: When the Swazi government released preliminary results of the national census a few weeks back, Prof. Dlamini, head of the national university's department of demography and statistics, took one look and concluded that the bureaucrats had made a terrible error.

The census, a door-to-door count through all of this country's hilly villages, found 912,229 Swazis. That is 17,489 fewer than were counted at the last census, a decade before.

Shrinking populations aren't news in developed countries such as Germany or Japan, but in developing countries such as Swaziland, in African countries where half the population was aged 16 or under the last time they counted, populations do not shrink. Until now.

"My training says that in demographic history, this is unprecedented and it cannot be accurate," Prof. Dlamini said in an interview this month in a small office crammed with books. "But my reality says otherwise."

The Swazi government, reacting in consternation to what the statistics imply, is refusing to call the census figures final. But if they are accurate - and most experts believe they are - they mean that Swaziland's population has not only dropped by 17,000 people; it is 300,000 people, or nearly 30 per cent of the population, below what was projected as the likely rate of growth 20 years ago.

While the figures are debated, no one here is uncertain about the cause of the drop. "If I were to sit down to count the people I have lost to HIV, I wouldn't get up again," Prof. Dlamini said with a sigh. He found himself recently arguing with colleagues; some said that it simply isn't conceivable that the population has actually shrunk. No developing nation has ever shrunk. But others pointed out that no country has ever, in recorded history, had an epidemic like that of HIV in Swaziland. And nobody knows what it will mean for the country's future.

A toxic mix of factors combined to make the epidemic so bad here: a highly infectious and virulent strain of the virus circulating in the population; a culture that condones, even encourages, promiscuity and polygamy in men, while denying women the right to refuse to have sex or insist on the use of condoms; a limited economy that relies on sending workers away from home for long stretches to work in highly infected South Africa; and a government, led by a playboy king with an ever-expanding stable of wives, that has denied the scale of the problem, and, while people were dying, poured funds into luxury-car purchases and highway expansions.

* "Swaziland: The economics of an epidemic"

Swaziland provides a horrific example of what an HIV epidemic can do to a fragile economy: In the early 1990s, economic growth was posted at about 6 per cent a year. But over the past decade, HIV is estimated to have reduced growth by at least 1.6 per cent, and in recent years as much as 2 per cent annually, so that the economy is now contracting.

The result? An equally rapidly expanding epidemic of poverty. The amount of land being tilled has dropped, the level of agricultural productivity has dropped, people have sold their assets to survive. A third of all children are orphaned, and more than half of the poorest households are taking care of orphans. This year, 40 per cent of the population survived on food aid from the United Nations.

"We're in a chronic disaster situation; there is no ability for society to cope," said Derek von Wissell, who heads the national AIDS agency. "There is no spare, no fat, no cushion in communities, in families."

Mangaliso Shongwe, a farmer in Nkambeni village 100 kilometres from the capital who lost his wife, two children and a brother to AIDS and is himself living with the virus, explained how it works. "A person gets sick and the family pays [for medical care]; a person dies and they pay for the funeral," he said. "Very soon you have no savings, you cannot pay to send children to school, you cannot pay to hire an ox to plow your field." He was moderately prosperous a decade ago, he said. These days he eats only one meal a day.