United Nations ? Donors were generous last week in pledging billions to rebuild Iraq — disproportionately generous compared with their donations to fight poverty and AIDS in the world’s poorest countries, development and AIDS officials said.

The $33 billion for Iraq over the next four years, including $20 billion from the United States, is more than 10 times the U.N. Development Program’s annual funds of $2.8 billion for all underdeveloped countries. The amount is also nearly 10 times the pledges to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, which kill millions every year.

At development agencies and in poor countries, leaders are worried that the generosity shown to Iraq will erode resources for other needs.

Stephen Lewis, the U.N. secretary-general’s special envoy for AIDS in Africa, called the contrast between pledges for Iraq and other donations an “upset in the scales of justice.”

“I don’t deny that Iraqis are under stress and numbers of them are dying tragically. But I am forced to point out that more than 2 million Africans are dying of AIDS every year, and their poverty is vastly more wretched,” he told The Associated Press.

At least 42 million people worldwide are infected with HIV, more than 28 million of them in sub-Saharan Africa, and more than 20 million have died, according to the U.N. World Health Organization. With the right funding, WHO says, it could get 3 million more people onto anti-AIDS medications by 2005.

But the Global Fund, which has been promised some $3.6 billion through 2005, is several billion dollars short of what it needs, Lewis said.

Iraq’s population is about 25 million.