The leaders of Brazil, India and South Africa solidified their ties Wednesday at a summit that highlighted the regional powers’ role as reprasentatives for the developing world.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, his South African counterpart Thabo Mbeki and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pressed for United Nations reform, urged richer nations to yield on heated trade talks and agreed to boost their cooperation on energy.
Their first trilateral summit in Brasilia came three years after the trio created the India-Brazil-South Africa Dialogue Forum (IBSA) to promote the interests of their emerging markets.
”We are pluralistic and multicultural societies. We are the largest democracies respectively on each of our continents and these values bind us in an unique way,” Singh said.
The summit’s host, Lula, has striven to boost relations between developing nations and traveled to New Delhi in 2004 as part of his effort.
”The potential of the relations between South Africa, India and Brazil is enormous,” Lula said as he spoke with Singh before business leaders from the three countries.
”We had not discovered it because for decades we were geared toward strong ties with countries of the North and we almost forgot the South-South relations,” he said.
The three leaders called for UN reform to be approved this year with the expansion of the UN Security Council to add permanent members from Africa and Latin America and another Asian member.
The 15-member council includes five permanent members with veto power: the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia.
”The council must reflect the growing weight of developing nations in the international scene,” Lula said ahead of next week’s UN General Assembly in New York. ”Its actual composition represents a world that no longer exists.”
In a joint statement, the leaders also called for ”fundamental” reform at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to reduce what they consider a ”serious imbalance” between developing and rich nations.
The three also ”deeply lamented” the collapse of the Doha Round of World Trade Organisation talks and called on developed nations to slash agricultural subsidies at the root of North-South trade disagreements.
Brasilia, New Delhi and Pretoria also agreed to cooperate on energy, including the development of alternatives to oil and possibly nuclear power.
”They agreed to explore the possibilities of cooperation in the peaceful use of nuclear energy under the appropriate safeguard” of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog, according to a joint statement.
Brazil, which taps into its huge sugar cane production to produce ethanol for cars, offered to help South Africa and India develop the alternative fuel.
Singh noted that the three nations are developing alternative sources of energy, from ethanol in Brazil to synthetic fuel in South Africa, and wind and solar power in India.
”IBSA can be effective in utilising our respective competitive strengths in these alternative energy technologies,” he said.
The three countries signed agreements on agriculture, energy, rail and naval shipping, and information technology.
They also announced plans to increase trilateral trade to $10-billion this year, compared to $8-billion in 2005.
The plans include deepening agreements between India, the five-nation Mercosur trade bloc in South America, and the Southern African Customs Union (SACU).
Mbeki described the IBSA as ”an important South-South axis” that offers great business opportunities.
”While IBSA is still in its early stage of development, this being the first summit, the opportunities for our people are clearly enormous,” he said. – AFP
