The leaders of Brazil and South Africa have committed themselves to the principle of evolving a new and vibrant view of global trade, South African Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said on Wednesday at the launch of the second Brazil-SA joint commission in Pretoria.
The minister — who praised Brazilian leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva for his inauguration message in January of “let’s get to work”, describing him as unambiguous yet “bold about the urgency of establishing a hard-work ethic and a
culture of focus in approaching government tasks”, said the leaders had identified that it would be necessary “for us to revisit the vertical North- South colonially inspired trade routes.”
“A horizontal axis of South-South commercial trade routes is indispensable
for the balance of trade flows.”
Referring to her Brazilian counterpart Celso Amorim’s meeting with South African Trade and Industry Minister Alec Erwin on Tuesday night, she said: “In your meeting last night … our bilateral trade flows would obviously have featured.”
“Whilst acknowledging that the past nine years have seen a steady growth of trade, which now stands at $700-million (R5,1-billion), the challenge, which needs imagination to deal with, is how to exploit the obvious potential for growth in trade.”
“We have to seek solutions on how we can diversify our trade and seek high value exports to exchange. We also have to identify investment opportunities of strategic benefit to our business people.”
“The automobile sector as the shining example of commercial trade, has scope for even further growth and we are encouraged by the buoyant activity we have noted in this area.”
Referring to big business, she said: “We must, however, see to it that we triple the Marcopolos and the Anglogolds, and seek more opportunities between each other.”
“We are of course encouraged by the fact that tourism continues to be on the rise. In a period of four years (flight) frequencies between our countries will increase from one to five by the middle of June.”
“Further negotiations towards a daily service are also underway,” said Dlamini-Zuma. – I-Net-Bridge