GENEVA, April 27 (Reuters) - An international fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria must at least triple its annual spending by 2010 to meet huge needs from developing countries, its governing board said on Friday. Michel Kazatchkine, who took over this week as executive director of the five-year-old Global Fund, said increasing annual spending to $6 billion or $8 billion within three years, would require a big contributions boost from both public and private donors. The figures would amount to a tripling or quadrupling of current spending by the fund, he said in a statement. Since its creation in 2002, the fund has become the dominant source of money for worldwide programmes against the three scourges that kill more than 6 million people a year, mostly in poor countries. About 80 percent of the $10.4 billion it has received so far has come from the Group of Eight (G8) nations: Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the United States, Canada, Japan and Russia. Donors to the Geneva-based body, which has to date committed $7.1 billion across 136 countries, are due to meet in Berlin in September to discuss funding for the 2008-2010 period. The Global Fund said it would seek donations from new countries as well as businesses to help meet its new target.
