Brazilian VP says Brics should focus on economics, not politics

14th June 2019

By: Rebecca Campbell

Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

     

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In comments made in Beijing on May 24, which appear not to have been much reported outside his home country, Brazilian Vice President Hamilton Mourão called on the Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (Brics) alignment to switch from political issues and focus instead on economic development. He was speaking at the end of a visit to China, which included a visit to the head office of the New Development Bank.

“Today, the economic question should be preponderant,” he said. “The political question. . . . I will not touch on certain details here, because there are details of this aspect that are more personal and secret. But we have a hybrid war in force in the world that comes from one of the members of Brics. So this raises a series of problems.”

This was seen as a reference to Russia. It should perhaps be pointed out that, while Russia has been backing the regime of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, Brazil has recognised Juan Guaidó as that country’s legitimate President.

Mourão said a Brics that ceased to seek political convergence would still have value for Brazilian interests. “We want to have flexibility and pragmatism,” he affirmed, “and seek that within Brics, which has the real capacity to – the five countries united – dictate at least some part of the global rules. But this political question – we have differences, which are very marked.

We need precisely to get away from being like a debating society, where the Presidents go, make half-a-dozen lovely speeches, sign a generic declaration and everything stays the same as it was in the Abrantes barracks (a proverb that means that, despite all the work done, everything stays the same).”

Regarding the New Development Bank, he said that Brazil should use it to fund infrastructure projects which “are stopped” in Brazil.

Brazil will host the next Brics summit in November. Currently, the South American country is the president pro tempore of the alignment. Mourão also met with Chinese President Xi Jinping, inviting him to visit Brazil at the time of the Brics summit.

The original Bric alignment of Brazil, Russia, India and China came into being in 2009 at its first summit meeting. But it can trace its roots back to a working meeting between the Foreign Ministers of the four founder-member countries on the margins of a session of the United Nations General Assembly in 2006. The idea of grouping these countries together, because of their roughly equivalent states of economic development, actually came from Jim O’Neill, then working at Goldman Sachs as head of global economic research, in a paper he wrote in 2001. South Africa joined the alignment in 2010 and attended its first Brics summit in 2011.

According to the US Central Intelligence Agency’s ‘The World Factbook 2019’, using purchasing power parity estimates of gross domestic product for 2017, China was the largest economy in the world, at $23.21-trillion. India ranked third, at $9.47-trillion. Russia was sixth, at $4.02-trillion, with Brazil in eighth place at $3.25-trillion. South African ranked 30th, with $767.2-billion. (The other countries in the top ten were the US, in second place, Japan fourth, Germany fifth, the UK ninth and France tenth.)

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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