São Paulo – The president of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, should visit Brazil in September, after visiting the Unites States to participate in the 67th General Assembly of the United Nations and prior to the Summit of South American-Arab Countries (Aspa), in Peru. According to the embassy of Egypt in Brasília, the visit has been confirmed, but the exact dates and the meetings he will have are yet to be defined.
The embassy of Brazil in Cairo and the Brazilian Foreign Office Brazilian Foreign Office (Itamaraty) stated that the Morsi‘s visit of to Brazil is forecasted. According to the Press Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic, the Egyptian president should arrive on September 28th. Still according to the Itamaraty, president Dilma Rousseff should meet with Morsi during his visit to the country. The meeting, however, is not yet included in the agenda of the Presidency of the Republic.
Morsi should get to the United States on September 23rd. There, he will have meetings with authorities in Washington and New York, where he will also participate in the General Assembly of the United Nations. The agenda forecasts that he should spend three days in the United States. After visiting North America and Brazil, he should participate in the Summit, on October 1st and 2nd, in Lima.
Morsi was the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood and won the Egyptian elections on June 24th. He was the first president to be elected in a free vote in the Arab country, after 30 years of the Hosni Mubarak dictatorship. Mubarak resigned from the presidency on February 11th last year, after popular protests.
Egypt has signed a free trade agreement with the Mercosur (which includes Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and now Venezuela). To be enacted, however, the treaty must be ratified by the parliaments of all countries in the bloc.
From January to July this year, Egypt imported the equivalent to US$ 1.2 billion in Brazilian products, equivalent to 15.3% of the US$ 7.8 billion that the 22 Arab countries bought from the country in the period. The main products imported by the Egyptians were sugar, beef, iron ore, chicken and maize.
*Translated by Mark Ament
