President Lula arrives this Thursday night (24) in Angola with the expectation of expanding cooperation with the African continent. Brazil’s trade flow with the region grew 33.7% in 2022 (total of US$21.3 billion), when compared to 2021 (US$15.9 billion). Still, it is far below 2012, when it was nearly $30 billion.
Lula has been on African soil since the beginning of the week to participate in the Brics summit, in Johannesburg. On the day he arrived in the South African capital, the Brazilian president classified the current stage of trade between the two countries as “unacceptable”. He also called the free trade zone project under development on the continent “ambitious” and said that there are “innumerable opportunities for Brazilian products, such as food and beverages, oil, iron ore, vehicles and iron and steel manufactures. steel”.
Currently, Brazil’s trade flow with African countries corresponds to only 3.5% of its foreign trade and the network of trade agreements is incipient, in the assessment of the Brazilian government.
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The president aims at product diversification, after all, the Brazilian export basket is made up predominantly of food, due to “a considerable setback in the participation of vehicles, machinery and equipment, in parallel with the decrease in diplomatic approximation”, explains the professor at the Department of Economics and International Relations at the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM), Igor Castellano. For him, the external promotion of industrialized items with high added value “requires political activism and mutual trust”, something that was not a priority during the Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro administrations.
As a result, Brazil has lost space to “big international competitors, such as China, India and the USA, but also medium-scale competitors, such as Turkey, Belgium, Holland and South Korea in the list of main suppliers of products to the continent. ”. These countries have established solid and long-term partnerships.
Angolans, on the other hand, export oil, above all. The Angolan government, says Castellano, knows that it needs to reduce its economic dependence on this good in order to face the scenario of future shortages, as do several countries in the Persian Gulf, for example. An alternative would be to use knowledge and technologies associated with the green economy as a core for the development of other agricultural, industrial and service economic sectors, “something that China has wisely done”.
Lula, in fact, mentioned this week that Brazil and several African countries have “comprehensive” plans to renew their energy matrices, in order to take care of tropical forests, preserve biodiversity and combat desertification.
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For Castellano, “economies dependent on the export of hydrocarbons have structural difficulties in directing such resources towards broad social development and economic diversification. This direction needs long-term planning and huge political efforts to materialize. Whether this will materialize depends on much of the correlation of political forces in Angola in relation to the interest in bearing the costs of this transition, in addition to Brazil’s willingness to carry out projects and transfer crucial technologies in cooperation”.
He assesses that Lula’s bet is “to use a very relevant instrument to stimulate the transformation of external partners in development, horizontal technical cooperation, and seek to share with Angola the experiences of the energy transition process that it is trying to implement internally”.
From Cerrado to Savannah
At the BRICS summit, the Brazilian president also highlighted the potential of African countries to produce their own food. “Africa has 65% of the arable land available in the world and a strong vocation to be an agricultural power, with the capacity to feed its people and offer solutions for global food security”.
Lula also mentioned modern techniques of tropical agriculture developed by Brazil that can be replicated, for example the agricultural productivity process developed by the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) in the Cerrado, which could be useful for the African Savannah.
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To discuss the relaunch of trade with the continent, Brazil gathered the heads of the trade promotion sectors of all its representations in African countries in Johannesburg, last June, and signaled the following: Brazilian foreign policy is committed to political relations and economic relations with African countries and societies, and there will be correspondence between the diplomatic routine and the real stimulus of the federal government to direct financial, human and institutional resources, as well as political legitimacy, to mobilize commercial relations.
Agenda
Lula will be received in Luanda, the Angolan capital, by President João Lourenço, by the National Assembly and will participate in a seminar and a business event that should be attended by around 60 Brazilian businessmen. On Sunday, he ends his tour of Africa by participating in the 14th Conference of Heads of State of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP), in São Tomé, capital of São Tomé and Príncipe.
Editing: Patricia de Matos
