Brazil BRICS meeting

CGTN Europe

CGTN Europe spoke to Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr, Former Vice President of the New Development Bank

Transcript

00:00Well, let's talk now to Paolo Nogueira Batista, Jr., who's the former vice president of the New Development Bank.

00:06Welcome to the program. Great to see you. Thank you for coming on.

00:09So I want to start by asking you about President Xi that we heard earlier in the program meeting the president of the New Development Bank,

00:16where you, of course, used to work.

00:18What do you think that meeting suggests about the bank's importance to the group?

00:24I'm very glad to have seen that. I was one of the founders of the New Development Bank 10 years ago.

00:30And the fact that President Xi goes to Shanghai, visits the bank, meets with the current president of the institution, Dilma Rousseff,

00:38is indicative of the importance that China attaches to this bank located in headquarters in Shanghai.

00:45Great thing.

00:47Well, let's talk, return then to BRICS, which, of course, has come a bit of a tumultuous time, if you like, particularly financially.

00:55How significant could this meeting at this time be?

01:00Well, I hope it will be significant. These meetings are sometimes ritualistic and do not really produce actual results.

01:08Take, for instance, the case of Gaza.

01:11I would expect that ministers, foreign ministers of BRICS countries and other, or representatives of the foreign ministers,

01:19would come out with a strong statement against the genocide in Gaza and a call for action.

01:25Let's see what happens when they conclude the meeting.

01:28But it's very important that the current hotspots, the current emergencies in the world, be faced by the BRICS as they meet.

01:36What about tariffs? That will be, of course, a hot topic for many countries.

01:41We were hearing there about Brazil's beef exports and how they may be sending more to China now rather than the United States.

01:48How important do you think it is that there's cooperation amongst the BRICS countries on that?

01:53It's very important because what happened since, actually, before Donald Trump, especially now, in his second term,

02:05is a tremendous erosion of the multilateral order established by the West and the U.S. leadership,

02:12undertaken by the West itself, especially by the United States.

02:16So this is something that the BRICS need to face up to.

02:20Of course, we know that the multilateral order is basically gone.

02:25But we need to prepare mechanisms to face the fact that now we're no longer living in that world that existed before.

02:33And where does China fit into this, do you think, into the BRICS countries?

02:37What does China's role look like?

02:40Well, China is, of course, the largest economy in the world, the second largest population,

02:48one of the five largest territories, the fifth or fourth, I'm not sure now.

02:52So China is always important. It's the largest country inside BRICS.

02:57It holds a lot of influence in the group.

03:00It was one of the founding members.

03:02So I believe that the BRICS without China wouldn't exist as the group now exists.

03:10It can do without other countries, but not without China, because of China's size in the world.

03:17And what I'm, as an economist, looking at what's going on now,

03:22I'm very well, very well impressed by the way China is reacting to this challenge posed by the new government in the U.S.

03:31China is being measured, firm, retaliating as appropriate,

03:36and is giving, in my opinion, an example to the world,

03:40how to face a country, the United States, that tries to bully other countries.

03:45And China is rising up to this challenge.

03:47We should take China in this matter and in others as an example, I believe,

03:51other countries in the BRICS and in the emerging market and developing world.

03:55Paolo Nogueira, Batista Jr., thank you very much for sharing your views today.

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