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Ibsa commits to advancing the 'South'

Shaun Benton

12 May 2008

The strategic alliance that is the India-Brazil-South Africa (Ibsa) trilateral axis has grown into a "privileged relationship" favouring a world where democracy will prevail not only in its political manifestation but also on social and cultural levels.

This was according to the Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, who joined South African Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee at the fifth Ibsa Ministerial Commission meeting at Somerset West in Cape Town on Sunday.

The Ibsa alliance, said Amorim, was "in favour of our peoples, of humanity, a world where democracy will prevail - not just a political democracy but a social, cultural democracy".

Mukherjee told the audience from the three countries gathered at the Lord Charles Hotel that it was truly a special relationship that now had the ability to impact on the world at large, should it be adequately substantiated.

Dlamini-Zuma, meanwhile pointed out that the Ibsa formation, started in 2003, had now gained unprecedented momentum as a cross-continental, trilateral forum that was now being noticed by the rest of the world.

In terms of trade - widely seen as probably the most important of the levers that turn the trilateral axis - the combined value at the end of last year had reached over $10-billion, said Mukherjee.

This meant that the three countries could feasibly see their target of $15-billion in turnover from combined trade by 2010 being exceeded, said Mukherjee, adding that the success of Ibsarequired the resolution of "connectivity problems".

The meeting of the three countries at ministerial level comes less than one year since a meeting in New Delhi, India, and precedes the third Ibsa presidential summit scheduled for the Indian capital in October.

The second summit of Ibsa - which had 10 working groups that brought together senior officials from the three countries - was hosted by South Africa last year.

Increased cooperation

Currently, the navies of the three countries are engaged in joint exercises - the first time the three nations are cementing the geopolitical alliance with military cooperation - off the coast of Cape Town, as part of the IbsaMar maritime camaraderie.

Such exercises raised the visibility of the Ibsa alliance and as such were very important, said Amorim, allowing the world to see how the three countries worked together and provided an evolving geopolitical identity.

Such an identity meant that the three rapidly developing countries were no longer subject, in their relations with one another, to the intermediation of richer, more powerful nations, he said, but rather, the three could now immediately engage in the "great economic space of the South".

The catalyst of tighter cooperation would be economic growth jointly encouraged and shared between the three nations - all leaders in their respective continents - said Dlamini-Zuma.

Dlamini-Zuma said that while the three countries had distinct views, from joint positions on global issues, such as United Nations reform, to government-to-government cooperation, the "people-to-people" cooperation between the three countries needed to be widened and deepened.

This ground level, people-to-people interaction would require less bureaucracy and more action on tangible issues of cooperation, she said.

Increased involvement from the South

Meanwhile, the three foreign ministers reiterated in a joint statement that the structures of global governance needed to become "more democratic, representative and legitimate by increasing the participation of the South in their decision-making".

Such a reordering of the international system would be meaningful only if accompanied by a comprehensive reform of the United Nations and its Security Council, both in the permanent and non-permanent categories of membership, they said.

Underlining the seriousness with which such reform was viewed, intergovernmental negotiations on the issue of reform of the 15-member - including five, permanent, veto-wielding countries - Security Council must commence forthwith, the statement added.

Similarly, a call for reform of the international financial institutions - most notably the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank - was reiterated, with India, Brazil and South Africa lamenting the slow rate of progress of such change, which would bring the voices of developing countries to the governance and administration of these crucial financial levers.

Millennium Development Goals

At the same time, the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals - aimed primarily at dramatically reducing global levels of poverty and hunger and 2015, required equity and transparency in international economic relations for developing countries.

To this end, the fifth Ibsa ministerial meeting welcomed a commitment made by India, at the Africa-India Forum Summit held last month, to extend a duty-free tariff preference scheme to all least developed countries, on the back of a similar commitment recently made by Brazil.

The three ministers also called on the world's most developed countries - the industrialised North - to provide a substantial and effective reduction in overall trade distorting support, such as farm subsidies.

Amorim likened the government subsidies to a drug that turned the farmers of rich nations into "addicts" while the real "victims" of this addiction were the developing countries, whose economies are in many cases still highly dependent on agriculture.

Trilateral trade

Trade between Brazil, India and South Africa also came into sharper focus, with the all governments welcoming moves by their trade ministers towards harmonising progress made in preferential trade agreements between the South African Customs Union (SACU) and Mercosur, the Latin American trading bloc.

Similar progress in the India-Mercosur trade axis could then culminate in an India-Mercosur-SACU trilateral trade arrangement, which was likely to be ultimately crucial to the real fruition of the Ibsa axis, with such an outcome being urged by the three ministers.

Intellectual property rights were also covered, with balance sought in order for these rights to become properly consolidated by the three nations.

Joint positions were also taken further biodiversity, climate change - with technology transfer to developing nations seen as a central to providing capacity for mitigation and adaptation - as well as sustainable development and not least, human settlements.

As of this year, the meeting noted, half the world's population was living in cities, with urban slum dwellers now numbering over one billion people. By 2020, most of the largest cities in the world would be located in the South, raising "serious concerns" over the urbanisation of poverty.

SAinfo reporter