The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, battling a shortfall in funding from donors, faces a critical year in 2005, its executive director said on Thursday.

Lack of cash means it is still unclear whether a new round of project funding against the three killers will be approved when the groups board meets in Arusha, Tanzania, on Nov. 17-19.

Richard Feachem said failure to act would be disastrous.

“The danger facing the Global Fund is that the board will decide not to launch a Round Five next year. Zero rounds in 2005 would be a catastrophe,” he said in an interview while attending an international pharmaceutical industry meeting in Spain.

“It would be a major loss of momentum for the worlds new financing mechanism against AIDS, TB and malaria and a betrayal of the vision and the trust and the hope that is placed in the Global Fund.”

The fund needs at least $2.5 billion to carry out its work in 2005, up from $1.5 billion this year, but so far has secured only around $1.6 billion.

There is likely to be a carryover of some $200 million from 2004, but commitments under existing programs will eat up $1.3 billion in 2005.

That means just $500 million may be left for new funding initiatives - half the amount of previous rounds at a time when investment should be accelerating sharply.

“We never thought it would be easy and the transition from 2004 to 2005, from $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion, is particularly challenging,” Feachem said.

He still hopes governments will dig deep to provide new funds, especially after a meeting of G8 leaders of industrialized countries next July at Gleneagles, Scotland.

The G8 declared in 2003 that the Global Fund should get $3 billion a year, with French President Jacques Chirac proposing $1 billion from Europe, $1 billion from the United States and $1 billion from other countries.

But donations to the Geneva-based public-private partnership have fallen short of such pledges, amid tensions between Washington and other governments over the best way of tackling AIDS.

More than half of the money committed by the fund so far to some 300 programs in 130 countries goes to fight HIV/AIDS, which has killed 20 million people in the past two decades and infected nearly twice that number.

U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Randall Tobias said in August he would hold back $120 million of this years promised donations to the fund because others donors had not contributed their share.

Since then, several countries have contributed more and Feachem said he hoped the fund would receive some - though not all - of the retained U.S. money.