Brazil and the hemisphere
Editorial
Stabroek News
June 15, 2003
Writing in the Sunday Stabroek of June 8, columnist David Jessop pointed out the changing balance of power in the Americas. The “United States,” he wrote, “may no longer have the same certainties and influence over what some in Washington regard as their hemisphere.” Among other things, he referred to Brazil’s growing economic power and that country’s evolving relations with India, South Africa, China and other advanced developing nations. “Serious consideration,” he said, “is being given to formalising such co-operation through the Rio Group.”
In fact, as revealed in a report in the Asia Times of June 13, the plan is even more ambitious: the three nations have created the IBSA (an acronym derived from the initials of their countries’ names), which their foreign ministers jokingly refer to as the ‘G3’ - the poor man’s G8. The Times said that it could even become a G5, since both China and Russia were showing interest. The new ‘South’ grouping, the report stated, was committed to increasing the bargaining power of developing countries in relation to the European Union (EU) and the US, and the heads of state of the three were to meet later this year to discuss in detail the matter of representation on the Security Council.
Mr Jessop also made reference to another change in the Latin firmament, namely, the fact that Brazil and Argentina had now made clear in public that there had to be genuine trade reciprocity with the US. More specifically, the price of their entry into the FTAA and support of the United States at the WTO would be the removal of that country’s “agricultural subsidies and its barriers to agricultural exports from larger Latin nations.” In this new game, said Mr Jessop, Mexico was partly being marginalised.
That the new developments were a cause for concern to the US was evidenced by a meeting which it called of 14 nations from South and Central America and the Caribbean (including Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago) which began on Thursday. According to an Associated Press (AP) report of June 12, the Bush administration was obliged to call the conference because of the “stalemate” which stood in the way of the implementation of the FTAA by 2005. The agency reported Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim on the opening day of that meeting as saying that Brasilia was interested in pursuing trade liberalization along three paths - the FTAA, the WTO and a separate free trade deal between the US and Mercosur, which comprises the Southern
Cone countries of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. Needless to say, the last path is not necessarily compatible with the first, and is clear evidence, among other things, that Brazil is taking a less expeditious approach to the matter of the FTAA than is the US.
In addition, the opening of the meeting coincided with a report of an announcement in the Seattle Times (among others) of a proposal by Brazil and Argentina to reinvigorate Mercosur. In addition to seeking free trade agreements with neighbours such as Peru and Venezuela, and, as indicated above, negotiating a bilateral pact with the United States, the Times said that Brazil and Argentina were looking to create a joint monetary institute and move towards a unified currency. Not least, they were proposing to set up a Mercosur Parliament.
Elaborating on the political aspects of Brazil’s economic moves, the Miami Herald on May 22 had reported on Brazil’s efforts to create “a South American political bloc,” which would “by definition... exclude Mexico and Central America.” The newspaper suggested that our neighbour to the south had the reconfiguration of the regional map in mind; that is to say, some of its officials were rejecting the notion of ‘Latin America,’ and substituting instead the geographical categories of South America, Central America and the Caribbean, and North America.
The Herald quoted Brazil’s ambassador to Washington, Rubens Barbosa, as saying at a May 2 conference in Miami that “Latin America is a concept that has been superseded.” He was reported as contending that the ‘new geography’ had been evident since the advent of NAFTA in 1994, between the United States, Canada and Mexico, and that South American countries had entirely different interests from those of the first-mentioned three nations.
While Mr Jessop placed emphasis on the (Latin) Rio Group, the Herald reported unnamed Latin American diplomats as expressing the fear that the creation of a South American political bloc, and the technique of holding regular summits of members of that bloc (President Cardoso held the first), would undermine the nineteen-member Rio Group among which Mexico and the Central American states are numbered. (The Rio leaders normally meet - as they did in Cuzco, Peru recently - to co-ordinate foreign policy.) “If we strengthen the South American summit,” the daily quoted one Latin foreign minister as saying, “the Group of Rio summit will begin losing steam.”
Inevitably the newspaper went on to report that Brazilian diplomats had denied any intention of undermining Rio, while it quoted Mexico’s Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs Miguel Hakim as saying that two regional groups could “co-exist and complement one another.” However, the Herald (not unreasonably, given the evidence) indicated that it was not persuaded by these demurrals.
The new hemispheric economic trends and their possible future political context have huge implications for a country like Guyana, and indeed, for Caricom as a whole. Given the size of her land mass, her population and her economy, it was inevitable that Brazil would move sooner or later to take her position on the world stage; it also makes logical sense that she would take steps to do this from a geographical base, rather than a linguistic one (quite apart from the fact that she was the odd one out among the Spanish speakers in any case). The plan to reinvigorate Mercosur at this point, therefore, is a significant development.
Mr Barbosa’s “new geography,” of course, would split the anglophone Caribbean into two groupings at least - the Eastern Caribbean which is anchored in a geopolitical sense to the South American mainland; and Jamaica, Belize and the Bahamas whose geostrategic interests relate to the arc formed by the US, Mexico, Central America and, by extension, the Greater Antilles.
All of which does not mean to say that the new alignments will follow a pre-determined course, or are even inevitable as currently conceived. There are certainly countries in the hemisphere which harbour a deep-seated suspicion of Brazilian designs, some of which were named by the Herald. It does mean to say, however, that the old formations in this hemisphere may be moving into a state of flux, which potentially, at any rate, could provide small nations with room for manoeuvre amid the evolving rivalries, and could even open avenues for a different quality of relationship with the north of the continent. It also means to say that Caricom is chronically in need of a new overarching vision, which takes into account current developments in the hemisphere, as well as the possible trends in the future.
And as for Guyana, it is in need of a more sophisticated approach to regional affairs, which is founded on a realistic analysis of macro developments. While the Ministry of Foreign Trade trumpets the Partial Scope Agreement with Brazil, for example, whose benefits at this stage will be minimal, that country, along with Australia is busy organizing a challenge at the WTO to the EU sugar regime on which Guyana’s economy is dependent. In other words, an advanced developing nation and a neighbour at that, which ostensibly is seeking through the IBSA to increase the bargaining power of developing countries, has moved to undermine the economy of a small, vulnerable, underdeveloped nation in the HIPC category.
The reasons for this almost certainly have nothing to do with Guyana, per se, or with any of the other ACP countries which will be affected by the challenge; rather they have to do with Brazil’s larger objectives, including her more active hemispheric approach and her intention as indicated earlier, to insist on trade reciprocity with the EU and the US, both of which operate trade barriers against her traditional exports.
They also have to do with the importance of agriculture to Brazil’s economy, which accounts for 29% of GDP and 41% of exports, according to Bloomberg. President ‘Lula’ recently undertook to boost aid to agriculture, and his government has budgeted the equivalent of $11.4B in credit and subsidies to farmers for 2004, said the agency. It quoted the President as saying that this “...should allow Brazil, the world’s largest producer of sugar, coffee and orange juice to have a larger crop next year.”
Brazil, understandably, is looking after her own interests. What Guyana has to appreciate is that despite a left-leaning President in office in Brasilia, and despite a consistently friendly stance towards this country over the years, Brazil’s macro-interests will not always be in consonance with Guyana’s interests. If we are to survive in these changing times, the Guyana Government has to be prepared to put the human and material resources into devising strategies to look after our interests in the most competent way possible.
