Johannesburg, South Africa ? Efforts to uplift the world’s poor will be meaningless without a massive international campaign to fight the AIDS pandemic ravaging Africa and other developing nations, a top U.N. official said Thursday.

“If AIDS is not brought under control, if people are not alive, if people are not healthy … (development) won’t happen,” Dr. Peter Piot, head of UNAIDS, told reporters at the World Summit for Sustainable Development.

An estimated 40 million people are infected with the virus that causes the deadly disease 70 percent of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

The pandemic is reducing life expectancies, devastating families and destroying economies, according to a report UNAIDS released Thursday in an effort to emphasize how crucial the AIDS fight is to development.

“AIDS increases poverty, there’s no doubt about that,” Piot said.

Negotiators on Thursday agreed to a clause in the conference’s action plan saying that by 2020 nations should aim to ensure chemicals are produced and used in ways that minimize their impact on human health.

South African Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad said negotiators had agreed on 80 percent of the document.

Also Thursday, the United States fought back after days of criticism for refusing to accept new binding targets for action, declaring itself to be the world’s leader in sustainable development and challenging the need for timetables to tackle poverty and environmental damage.

Bush administration officials laid out a series of partnerships with industry and foundations to address some of the world’s most pressing problems: energy, clean water, sanitation, hunger, among others.

The partnerships have been in the works for weeks and many already were widely acknowledged. U.S. officials said they made a declaration to rebut a growing perception that the United States was not engaged in foreign problems.

U.S. officials also pointed to the government’s plans to spend $1.2 billion next year fighting AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in the developing world.

AIDS, which disproportionately affects adults of working age, is killing millions of productive workers in some of the world’s poorest countries. Business costs there are rising because of constant absenteeism and the cost of training workers to replace those that have died.

Millions of children drop out of school after they are orphaned and forced to care for their families, depriving them of an education that could help them prosper. Another million children lost their teachers to the disease last year.