The senseless killing of thousands of innocent persons including more than a score of Guyanese who had migrated to the USA, in search of a better living, the destruction of towering buildings representing a pinnacle of human skill, the hijacking of jets and the making of them into weapons of mass murder and destruction - all these and more filled the mind with overwhelming feelings of fear and terror. For nearly three weeks one could think and discuss little else.

Now there is the consequential fall-out including the near collapse of international airlines. In Caricom member states the huge cancellation of tourist bookings will impact severely on levels of revenue and employment, especially in the fragile economies of the OECS states. Aggravating the effects of the world-wide recession, the events in New York and Washington are precipitating changes which may affect Guyana in still not wholly foreseeable but harmful ways.

One unfortunate effect has been to sweep from public attention another global crisis in which thousands of persons including mothers and children die each day. It is the HIV/AIDS pandemic and this slipping from attention is happening at a time when it looked that the gravity of the AIDS situation was at last beginning to find a priority place on the global agenda. On the initiative of the US government the question of coping with the world-wide threat of AIDS had been considered at four meetings of the UN Security Council. More recently there had been a special session of the UN General Assembly at which Guyana had been represented by the Minister for Health. A special fund had been set up for the treatment of AIDS, to be administered by the World Bank and from which Guyana will almost certainly benefit.

To date the fund has failed to attract the seven billion dollars required to make it effective. On the other hand the cost of current mobilisation of US and British forces in the Middle East will almost certainly run to billions of dollars - a situation which destroys the prospects for the AIDS fund.

In Africa the scourge of AIDS is leading to rapid depopulation - this in the continent where the human species (homo sapiens) emerged.

After Africa, the Caribbean, it has been reported, has per capita the second highest rate of infection. AIDS may already be, if its implications for development are pondered, the major component in the social and economic crisis overtaking the Caricom region. Owen Arthur, the Prime Minister of Barbados, speaking here last year asserted that "In the social sphere, the Caribbean ranks high on the list of those countries which face the threat of being overwhelmed by the HIV/AIDS epidemic." It is therefore essential despite the pressure of other global events that the treatment of AIDS remains on the front burner. But this will not be easy. Although thousands die each day this is not a media event. No one makes lists of the dead. There are no memorial services, there is no financial network, mostly pervasive poverty. There is no conspiracy, only the conspiracy of silence and the determination to give as little publicity as possible to the situation.

The UN General Assembly session had reflected earlier this year a new emphasis in approach to AIDS. The focus is now not only on prevention but on treatment, the use of the so-called anti-retroviral therapy which if it does not exactly cure, inhibits the disease and prolongs life. The therapy consists of the use of twelve drugs, the so called AIDS cocktail. Thereby hangs a tale of conflict and exploitation. A month's supply of these drugs for one patient costs about three and a half thousand US dollars at the prices normally charged by the powerful pharmaceutical companies who own the patents for production. In this and other cases for the supply of drugs the pharmaceutical companies have contended that their high prices are not exploitative but are based on the high costs of years of research and experiment which have preceded discovery and production, but none has so far produced evidence of such costs. In the case of the AIDS drugs it is known that the contention is untrue as the fundamental research had been done by US government agencies and by US universities.

In view of such unaffordable costs several large countries have sought to manufacture the drugs, first India and more recently South Africa and Brazil.

In the case of South Africa about fifty of the most powerful pharmaceutical companies including the giants sought through legal action to stop South Africa production, basing their case on the WTO Agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) which protects patents. South Africa for its part invoked a provision of that agreement which enables a government in the case of national emergency to produce the drug with or without the consent of the patent holder. South Africa won, the pharmaceutical companies withdrew their case, agreeing at the same time to pay all of South Africa's legal costs. Over the last few months, Brazil which already manufactures most of the AIDS drugs has also been embroiled in conflict with a giant company which holds the patent for an essential drug which Brazil had decided to produce. That situation has apparently now been settled with the company offering the drug at a substantially lower price.

The urgent need for affordable AIDS drugs points to the necessity for joint action by Caricom countries to ensure the rational use of the economic assistance which should be forthcoming from the World Bank. Caricom should insist as is permitted under TRIPS on the purchase of the drugs not from the pharmaceutical companies but as so-called 'parallel imports' from cheaper producers in India, South Africa and our neighbour Brazil. Moreover, Caricom should aim to move beyond imports to the establishment of production and research facilities and the World Bank funding should be channelled to such purposes. After all Cuba has shown that the discovery of new drugs such as Interferon and Meningitis vaccine is not wholly a function of scale. The Meningitis vaccine is now being produced by a US corporation under licence with the Cuban entity.

The struggle over the supply of the AIDS drugs is only one part of the protracted effort of developing countries to get rid of the exploitative restrictions imposed upon them through the agreements establishing the World Trade Organisation (WTO). This struggle may come to a head at the forthcoming Ministerial Meeting of WTO in Qatar. Since the terrorist crisis a new search for international co-operation has characterised the external policies of the West. If such co-operative approach could spill over into the WTO deliberations at Qatar in November, Ground Zero would not only mark the huge atrocity but the beginning of new steps towards the building of global community.