U.S.- South Africa Strategic Dialogue

On December 14, 2010 in Washington, D.C., Secretary of State Clinton and South Africa’s Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Maite Nkoana-Mashabane met for the first time under the auspices of the U.S.-South Africa Strategic Dialogue, created in April 2010. The two governments signed a President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief Partnership Framework on December 14.

In addition, a series of working-level bilateral meetings took place December 9-10 on law enforcement, trade, transportation, human rights, health, and agriculture, followed by out-briefs of goals and accomplishments on December 13. New areas of cooperation were identified during those discussions and progress on those issues will be pursued by the individual working groups.

Since the formation of the U.S.-South Africa Dialogue the following goals have already been met:

• The PEPFAR Partnership Framework outlines a shared five-year vision for PEPFAR, in which the U.S. moves from providing emergency service delivery to building capacity and advising, and in which South Africa continues to be empowered with the resources and information it needs to combat this devastating disease. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and CDC’s Global Disease Detection program also forged new links with their South African counterparts.
  
• In September 2010, the U.S. and South African Department of Defence signed an agreement to extend cooperation on Project Phidisa, a groundbreaking clinical research collaboration among the South African Department of Defence and Military Veterans, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Also in September, Cape Town hosted the 2010 African Aerospace and Defense Show, which brought together military officials and defense industry representatives from both countries. An agreement for greater cooperation signed by the leading defense industrial associations of South Africa and the United States showcased the important defense and economic links between our countries.
  
• In October, the S.A. Department of Energy hosted an investors conference in support of a 5000-megawatt solar park in the Northern Cape, which, when completed, may be the largest such project in the world. The solar park project has been driven by a unique public-private process involving the South African government, American private companies, and the Clinton Climate Initiative, which funded and completed a prefeasibility study for the project. The solar project underscores our increasingly close collaboration on the critical challenges facing the world with respect to climate change and renewable resource development.
  
• United States-South African cooperation was instrumental in helping produce a consensus way forward among Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Parties at the May 2010 Review Conference.
  
• With support from the U.S. Department of Energy, NTP Radioisotopes, Ltd. - a subsidiary of the Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa (Necsa) - delivered the first patient use approved shipment of the medical isotope Mo-99 using low enriched uranium (LEU) fuel and targets to the United States on December 6, 2010. As a result, Necsa has become the world's first supplier of large-scale LEU-based Mo-99 to the global market. Mo-99 is a crucial radioisotope that is used in approximately 80 percent of all nuclear medicine diagnostic procedures and in roughly 50,000 diagnostic and therapeutic nuclear medicine procedures performed every day in the United States. Mo-99’s primary uses include the detection of disease, including heart disease and cancer, and to study organ structure and function. This effort was part of a $25 million award to Necsa from DOE/NNSA to support highly enriched uranium (HEU) minimization and the conversion of the Necsa/NTP process from the use of HEU to LEU targets. In addition to meeting public health needs, this collaboration also helped advance the communiqué agreed to by 47 world leaders at the 2010 Nuclear Security Summit, which calls for participating states, as appropriate, to collaborate to research and develop new technologies that require neither HEU fuels for reactor operation nor HEU targets for producing medical or other isotopes, and encouraged the use of LEU and other proliferation-resistant technologies and fuels in various commercial applications such as isotope production.