France Plans Tax on Airline Tickets to Finance Global Fight on Poverty

France is planning to put a tax on airline tickets next year to help finance the global fight against poverty, President Jacques Chirac said Monday.

While the idea is still being discussed at the international level, Chirac said France hopes to put it in place as soon as possible. The tax will go first toward fighting AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, Chirac said.

"Without waiting, I asked the government to start the procedures necessary to put such a tax in place next year," Chirac told French ambassadors gathered in Paris.

France, Germany, Algeria, Brazil, Chile and Spain will push for an international tax on airline tickets at a U.N. summit in New York in mid-September, Chirac said. Meanwhile, France would prepare its pilot program.

The reasoning behind the "solidarity levy" was presented by French Finance Minister Thierry Breton at a two-day U.N. ministerial meeting in June. Brazil, Chile and Germany backed the plan there.

In the search for new ways to fund the U.N. goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015, Breton said then that an airline tax was "one of the most promising solutions for the developing countries and for the international aid architecture."

He said airline tickets were chosen because airlines benefit from globalization and pay low tax rates, because airline passengers "are rarely among the poorest citizens," and because the practical and legal feasibility of similar levies has been proven in Britain and elsewhere.

World air traffic has grown at an average of 9 percent every year since 1960, France says.

Last month, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan told Britain's Financial Times newspaper that he supported the plan and that the idea "seems to be taking hold." Chirac wrote to 145 leaders around the world later that month to try to win support.

"If the September summit does serve to launch this plan, it will mark a historic moment of hope, mobilization and action," he wrote.

Chirac said at the time that budgetary increases alone would not be enough to finance the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals _ targets to reduce poverty, hunger and disease affecting billions of people _ and that innovative solutions were needed.

As an example, French authorities say that a tax of about euro5 ($6.14) per passenger worldwide, with a euro20 ($24.58) surcharge for business class, would generate about euro10 billion ($12.29 billion) a year. The contribution could be adjusted in poorer countries, so passengers there are not penalized.

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