São Paulo – On September 23rd, the diplomat Roberto Abdalla will take office at the Brazilian embassy in Doha, Qatar, tasked with making relations between the Arab country and Brazil more dynamic. The decision to take ties between the two nations to a new, denser level was made by Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff and the Qatari emir, Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani, during a trip of the Brazilian head of state to Qatar last year. They made a point of building closer ties in energy, sports, education, trade and investments.
As his term begins in Doha, Abdalla’s first mission will be to organize a mission from Qatar to Brazil, with meetings between foreign ministers and entrepreneurs in late November. Abdalla claims Qatar is the Middle Eastern country with the most fluid ties to Brazil. It was the sole Middle East nation visited by Dilma Rousseff, and twice the destination of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The previous emir, Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani, and his wife, Mozah Bint Nasser Al Missned, travelled to Brazil on an official visit as well.
The diplomat says the five areas of interest defined by the countries’ leaders could take relations to a whole new level, and that the meeting scheduled for November is already a formidable “framework” for such. Abdalla says areas where progress could be made include increasing Qatar’s purchases of Brazilian gas and attracting investment from Qatar’s sovereign fund, the Qatar Investment Authority, into infrastructure and energy in Brazil.
He also believes work could be done in sports, seeing as Brazil hosted the FIFA World Cup 2014, will host the Olympics in 2016, and Qatar is poised to welcome the FIFA World Cup in 2022. The diplomat also mentions the fact that Qatar is working to become an international knowledge hub. “In all of these fields, Brazil has a lot to contribute and a lot to gain as well,” the ambassador said in an interview to ANBA.
Qatar and Brazil have a small but growing foreign trade. Year-to-August, Brazil sold US$ 270 million in exports to the Arab country, and Qatar sold US$ 577.7 million to the Brazilian market. Brazilian exports consists of, mainly, meats, inorganic chemicals and ores, and Qatar’s exports consists of organic and inorganic fertilizers, fuels and lubricants, besides plastics, according to the diplomat. But, according to Abdalla, trade increased 800% in the last ten years.
Despite not being a significant trade in volume in comparison to what Brazil imports and exports, Abdalla lists a series of reasons that make Qatar an attractive and important country to Brazil. Among them are the country’s gas reserves, its sovereign fund, which is one of world’s largest, and the country’s wealth, which is large in comparison to the numbers of the population. He also reminds the country’s leadership in the region and the internal social cohesion of Qatar.
Abdalla says he assumes his post in the embassy in a moment in which the bilateral relations between Brazil and Qatar are excellent. He points out that it’s been ten years since Brazil opened its embassy in Doha and 41 years of diplomatic relations with the country.
Born in Recife, Pernambuco, and of Lebanese descent, Abdalla had for two years the post of director of Foreign Service at the Ministry of External Relations (Itamaraty). Before, he was Brazil’s ambassador at Kuwait City, cumulatively with Bahrain, for four years. But the diplomat’s experience with the Arab world started even before that, as the head of the Middle East II Division of Itamaraty, a post he held for five years.
Abdalla’s diplomatic career started in 1985 and since then, until he assumed as the head of the Middle East II Department, Abdalla held a series of jobs, at Itamaraty and abroad, in cities such as Caracas, Venezuela, and London, England. The first years were marked by his work with trade promotion.
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum and Sérgio Kakitani
