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Foreign Ministers of Brazil, Russia, India and China to meet

Sandeep Dikshit

The BRIC grouping will focus on economics and cooperation

The four countries complement each other: Goldman Sachs report
‘By 2050, their economies could disturb the pecking order of rich countries’

NEW DELHI: Foreign Ministers of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) will meet exclusively for the first time in the Russian city of Ekaterinburg on May 14 with economics and cooperation at multilateral fora topping the agenda.

A meeting of Foreign Ministers of Russia, India, China (RIC) will take place at the same venue the next day as a follow-up to their regular interactions, the latest being in Harbin, China, last year. Although the BRIC Foreign Ministers have discussed the prospects of mutual cooperation on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, the agenda here will be solely focused on promoting the concept of BRIC, first articulated by Goldman Sachs in 2003.

The meetings at the U.N. saw the Foreign Ministers asking their Ambassadors and other ranking officials at international bodies to interact with each other more frequently especially on trade, energy, environment and finance. The ground work for the upcoming meeting was laid by an interaction between the Deputy Foreign Ministers in April.

Though the BRIC concept was articulated by the corporate sector, the four countries found it practical to adopt it as part of foreign diplomacy especially in view of their reservations towards some of the policies being defended by the U.S. at world bodies.

The last meeting of the G-8 ended in disappointment for India and Brazil over not being adequately consulted. At the same time, some G-8 members are in favour of giving India, Brazil and China full membership.

The BRIC countries at their last meeting gave ample indications of their resolve to work together. The upcoming meeting would see them make more concrete arrangements in this respect. According to the Goldman Sachs report “Dreaming with BRICs: The path to 2050,” which focused exclusively on the economic potential, the four countries totally complement each other.

China and India are strong in manufacturing while Brazil and Russia could emerge as major raw material suppliers to the first two. Brazil is also politically close to Venezuela, like Russia another major oil producer. Russia, China and India are also more acceptable to the Central Asian ‘raw material’ tigers with immense energy resources.

By 2050, the report predicts, the economies of the four countries could disturb the pecking order of rich countries. Collectively, their wealth will outstrip that of the original G-6 countries (the U.S., France, Germany, the U.K., Japan and Italy). And a diplomat said by then their middle class would be “brobdingnagian” (of extraordinary size). An update was more optimistic than the original report on India’s economic prospects.

Diplomats here say while this premise waits to be borne out, the BRIC grouping is a strand of foreign policy favoured by all the four participating countries. They have strong economic ties with the U.S. and other western countries but have been unable to reconcile positions on some issues as reflected from the fact that all of them are members of the G-20 which opposes farm subsidies by rich countries to their farmers.

Analysts feel the threat of a intensive BRIC coalition at global fora could compel the U.S. and other countries to be more accommodative of their individual concerns.

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