The President of the Republic, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, defended, in his first speech during his official visit to China, the fight against poverty and the reforms of multilateral organizations, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Lula also said Brazil “is back” on the international stage after an “inexplicable” absence.
“The time when Brazil was absent from major global decisions is over,” said the president at the inauguration ceremony of Dilma Rousseff at the helm of the New Development Bank (NDB, in its acronym in English), the so-called bank of the BRICS – group formed by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
Lula said the NDB “has great transformative potential” as it “frees emerging countries from subservience to traditional financial institutions.”
In addition to the four new members it recently acquired — Bangladesh, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Uruguay — Lula said “several more” countries are in the process of joining the institution. “And I am sure that the arrival of President Dilma will contribute to this process,” she said.
For a woman to lead “a global bank of this magnitude” is in itself “an extraordinary fact,” Lula said. “But the historical importance of this moment goes further,” he corrected, saying that the former president of Brazil, who assumes her first public office since being impeached in 2016, belongs to a generation that in the ‘ 70 fought to “put the dream of a better world into practice – and they paid dearly, many of them with their own lives”.
“Developing countries’ unmet financing needs were and remain enormous,” Lula said, advocating “effective reforms” of traditional financial institutions as a way to increase lending volumes and patterns.
Reforms in multilateral organizations
Speaking of reforms in multilateral organizations, Lula cited the United Nations (UN), but also the IMF and the World Bank, and asked that emerging countries use the G-20, the group of richest countries, “creatively ” of the world, with “the aim of reinforcing priority issues for the developing world on the international agenda”. In 2024, Brazil will be the president of the G20.
In Brazil, NDB resources finance infrastructure projects, income support programs, sustainable mobility, climate change adaptation, basic sanitation and renewable energy, according to Lula.
Financing by countries
The president also stated that the NBB “represents a lot” for those who are aware of the countries’ need for growth and financing. “No government can work with the ‘knife in the throat’ because it is in debt. The banks must have the patience to renew the agreements if necessary and put the word ‘tolerance’ at each renewal, because it is not up to a bank to stifle the Countries with economies, as the International Monetary Fund is doing now with Argentina.
According to the president, the “dream” of creating the NDB represents having “a development tool that was strong and will certainly be strong, which lends money with a view to helping countries, not suffocating”. “Because otherwise we will never see developing countries, the poorest, succeed in developing,” he said.
Lula said that all countries should have the right to borrow, as long as the goal is to create a new asset, something that translates into more “future, investment capacity, production, exports”. «It is the world that we have to see, not this world of people who look like geniuses and, when it fails, as Lehman Brothers did in 2008, it is the state that has to take charge of the accounts. And now with the collapse of Credit Suisse, it has given lessons of wisdom to every country in the world and whoever had to bail out the bank was the Swiss government.”
Lula also said that the BRICS bank should have more functions, such as having a currency for trade relations between countries. “Every night I wonder why all countries are forced to do their trade pegged to the dollar, and not our currency? Why don’t we commit to innovation?” she asked.
Source: Terra
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