Tripoli – The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said this Tuesday (30th) that Brazil is wiling to establish partnerships for investing in Africa. Lula will be the guest of honour at the opening session of the African Union (AU) heads of state assembly, due Wednesday in Sirte, Libya. “Brazil is willing to establish partnerships, be it with the European Union, be it with the United States, in order to invest in Libya,” said the president during a press conference held at the Corinthia Bab Africa hotel in Tripoli, a few hours after he arrived in the capital of the Arab country.
To Lula, more than money, African countries need projects that will ensure its development. To that extent, the Brazilian government is going to sign three cooperation agreements with the AU: one for extending to other nations the initiative of a model cotton farm in Mali, which currently also favours Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali; another on social development; and the last one on agricultural cooperation, with special emphasis on training to small farmers, sales techniques, and market access.
The key theme of the AU summit will be “Investing in Agriculture for Economic Growth and Food Security,” a field in which the government believes that Brazil may contribute a lot. The invitation was extended to Lula by the AU Commission’s chairperson, a position equivalent to that of a secretary general, Jean Ping, from Gabon. To the Brazilian diplomacy, it is an acknowledgement of the country’s efforts for strengthening relations with the continent. “It is a sign for the entire world to see that Brazil is regarded as an important player in Africa,” said the Brazilian ambassador to Tripoli, Luciano Ozório Rosa.
Along those lines, the president mentioned a series of projects that have already been initiated involving knowledge transfer and investment, such as the building of a medication factory in Mozambique, the model farm in Mali, and a training program for teaching the Portuguese language (spoken in Brazil) to teachers in African countries. “We have a strong cooperation policy with Africa,” he stated. “And there is a possibility of strengthening it even further,” he added.
He also said that the Brazilian initiatives in the continent are a two-way street. Aside from helping the development of Africa, according to him, the country also profits from it. As an example, the president mentioned the expansion of trade between Brazil and Africa, which increased from around US$ 5 billion, as of the start of his first term in office, in 2003, to US$ 25 billion as of last year; and of trade with the Arab nations, which rose from US$ 4.9 billion to more than US$ 20 billion over the same period. All of the Arab countries in Africa, except Morocco, are members of the AU. The organisation has 53 members.
Lula said once again that Brazil, the United States and Europe have a historic debt to Africa that is “impossible to settle from the financial point of view,” the former two due to the slaving of African blacks up until the second half of the 19th century, and the latter because of colonization. In this respect, he asserted that Brazil has technology to offer in order to aid development, particularly in the agricultural field, because parts of the African continent have a similar weather to regions of Brazil in which the sector is strongly developed.
The Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) already has an office in Ghana, Africa. According to the Brazilian foreign minister Celso Amorim, who accompanies the president, Brazil has a differential, namely offering training to African populations without asking for anything in return. Presently, developed and emerging countries, such as China and India, have keen commercial interest in the country. According to ambassador Luciano Rosa, Brazil does not show a voracious appetite for the continent’s natural resources, and is thus regarded with less distrust.
“The developed world can also establish partnerships with African companies for developing the continent,” said Lula. He cited the biofuels sector, in which African nations may operate to supply other markets at cheaper prices than those charged by Europe and the United States, where ethanol, for instance, is manufactured from beet and maize, respectively.
Guests
The head of the Americas Department at the Libyan Ministry of Foreign Relations, Mohamed Matri, former ambassador of Libya in Brazil, said that other matters of regional and international interest are going to be discussed during the AU summit.
The summit, which will continue until Friday (3rd), should be attended by heads of state and government from more than 40 African nations, as well as the secretary general of the League of Arab States, Amr Mussa, and the UN secretary general, Ban Ki Moon. The Libyan leader, Muammar Kadafi, has also invited the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, both of whom have confirmed their attendance.
As for Italy, ambassador Rosa recalled that the European country and Libya have put an end to the animosity that persisted because of Italian colonization and signed agreements that forecast, on the Libyan side, aid against illegal immigration in Europe and, on the Italian side, investment of US$ 1 billion per year in Libya, over the course of five years, including the construction of a road linking the country’s Egyptian border to its Tunisian border.
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
