Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 23 2008 (IPS) – The India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA) Dialogue Forum will hold its third annual summit on Oct. 15 in New Delhi, India, the first such meeting after this trilateral body of countries of the developing South met with a serious setback at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations.
India and Brazil ended up on opposite sides of the disagreement that caused the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations to fail in July, after five years of joint leadership of the Group of 20 (G20), representing the countries of the South at the deliberations.
The G20 had achieved an unprecedented degree of prominence in the mediation and representation of the interests of the developing world.
Safeguards demanded by India and other poor countries in order to protect their agriculture, which they regard as essential to ensure food security, were not included in the proposal supported by Brazil and rich countries at the talks.
This proposal, which emerged from the directorate-general of the WTO, sought a consensus that would save the Doha Round from collapse. Failure, however, was finally admitted on Jul. 29.
The split appears to corroborate the views of several Brazilian analysts and former ambassadors, who say that IBSA is becoming irrelevant because of difficulties in reconciling divergent interests, and because of a lack of economic complementarity, exacerbated by trade competition among the countries.
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There are many differences within the group, ranging from historical and cultural diversity to the fact that India is the only one of the three to possess nuclear weapons.
But there are also many similarities and ties that bind the countries together: all three are regional powers that aspire to a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, and they all suffer from serious poverty which makes faster development an urgent priority.
Furthermore the IBSA Forum, created in 2003 to renew South-South cooperation, is an alliance oriented as much towards coordinating action to narrow global imbalances as towards fomenting trade and trilateral relations.
Sixteen working groups have been created to coordinate sectoral cooperation between the three countries, including public administration, energy, climate change and different social and economic areas.
The groups have already produced several agreements. Some working groups will meet this month and in October in New Delhi, ahead of the summit.
Other initiatives involve women, entrepreneurs, parliamentarians and intellectuals in specific forums that are attempting to broaden dialogue between societies that geography and history have set so far apart.
In parallel, non-governmental organisations and social movements have begun their own dialogue to redefine IBSA cooperation, with the intent that it should respond to the real interests of our peoples, rather than the commercial interests which are paramount in the official IBSA initiative, according to Cândido Grzybowski, the head of the Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Analyses (IBASE).
A South-South dynamic that at the same time maintains the logic of the marketplace, simply substituting transnational corporations of the South for those of the North and biofuels for oil to the detriment of food security, is not acceptable, he told IPS.
However, Grzybowski acknowledged that IBSA has at least created the opportunity for debate between the people of nations that were formerly strangers.
Perhaps scientific and technological cooperation is the area in which the economic and social interests of IBSA governments and their societies come together the most.
A priority, together with biotechnology, nanotechnology and oceanography, is cooperation in health matters, particularly the fight against malaria, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.
Developing vaccines and more effective medicines for diseases that have been overcome or do not exist in industrialised countries, like malaria, is a low priority for the global pharmaceutical industry, which is interested in wealthy markets. This increases the need for South-South cooperation.
Science ministers are due to meet on the eve of the New Delhi summit to devise practical collaborative programmes, which will have a Scientific Coordination Council in each country, said José Monserrat Filho, who is in charge of international affairs at the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology.
The origins of IBSA go back to the alliance between several countries, including these three, which achieved flexibilisation of the rules on intellectual property at the WTO in 2001, permitting compulsory licensing of patented medicines in emergencies, such as the AIDS epidemic.
HIV/AIDS, which has already caused the breaking of patent privileges, is an emblematic case of IBSA cooperation, because India possesses the greatest generic drugs industry in the world, and Brazil and South Africa carry out mass treatment programmes, said Mariángela Simao, the head of the Brazilian Programme of Prevention and Control of Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STD) and AIDS.
This exemplary government programme guarantees universal access to state-of-the-art antiretroviral medication, free of charge, for all HIV-positive patients who need them.
At present 185,000 people receive the cocktail of antiretroviral drugs, only one of which is imported from India. An estimated 600,000 people in Brazil are living with the AIDS virus.
South Africa has about 200,000 HIV-positive people receiving treatment, but an estimated one million people need the medication, Simao said. Progress has been made in recent years, but patients must pay for the drugs.
India provides drugs to the developing world, but distributes few to its own population, among whom 3.8 million people are infected with HIV.
A technological cooperation network to combat HIV/AIDS, created in 2004, now has eight developing countries as members. It is devoted to reducing dependence on the industrialised North, producing more generic drugs and reducing the cost of antiretroviral medications. India and South Africa were founder members but have since left.
In addition to the sectoral cooperation that is under way, the IBSA Forum has also helped boost trilateral trade.
Trade between Brazil and India has more than tripled since 2003, to 3.1 billion dollars in 2007. Growth of trade between Brazil and South Africa has been slightly lower.
India and South Africa represent only 1.9 percent of Brazil s foreign trade, but that proportion has doubled since 2000, indicating there may be unexploited potential for further growth.
Such a rate of expansion is inconsistent with the alleged lack of complementarity between the three economies, dwelt on by critics of the Third World ideology that IBSA stands for, who are calling for a return to foreign policies that have already failed.
International conditions and developing countries have changed enormously, opening up possibilities for cooperation that cannot be compared to previous South-South initiatives that were attempted over half a century ago, Monserrat at the Foreign Ministry told IPS.
The three countries have made advances in sectors such as biotechnology and nanotechnology and, separately, in areas like biofuels and tropical agriculture in Brazil, and information technology in India.
Cooperation, exchange and trade will not only reduce dependence on the North, but also increase the productivity and competitiveness of the IBSA group of countries, Monserrat said.
