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Trade Ties That Cut Out the West
By ALAN WHEATLEY | REUTERS
If trade is the mortar holding together the BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China and the newcomer, South Africa — the omens would appear poor for the grouping, which will hold its annual summit meeting Thursday on the southern Chinese island of Hainan.
To its detractors, BRICS is an artificial construct — an example of life imitating not art but Goldman Sachs, which coined the acronym BRIC in 2001 for four fast-growing, politically diverse countries that it believed were reshaping the global economy.
A more optimistic view holds that the explosion in south-south trade, which leapt to 17 percent of the global total in 2009 from 7 percent in 1990, has a long way to run.
Moreover, some experts say the BRICS caucus has already shown its worth as a counterweight to the West in global talks on trade and climate change and, within the Group of 20 leading economies, on how to redistribute power in international financial institutions.
In each case, despite differing positions, the five have acted collectively to prevent advanced countries from driving wedges between them, said Sourabh Gupta of Samuels International Associates, an international trade and political risk assessment firm in Washington.
“There is a certain basic logic to their economic interaction,” Mr. Gupta said. “They have not allowed themselves to be co-opted by Western countries. Either they’re going to hang together or hang alone.”
This is not to deny that the Chinese export juggernaut is causing strains, exacerbated by Beijing’s determination to let the renminbi, otherwise known as the yuan, rise only slowly.
Countries like Brazil — but also the likes of Portugal — that are above China on the value chain are struggling to compete in intermediate, capital-intensive products.
“They have genuine reasons to be worried,” Mr. Gupta said. “If nothing else, at least the unfairness arising from the yuan’s undervaluation is an issue that needs to be tackled pronto.”
President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil was to broach the issue of the renminbi during her five-day visit to China, starting Tuesday, but her officials say she will avoid direct confrontation.
“What we want is more reciprocity,” Rodrigo Baena, the presidential spokesman, said about the objectives of the visit.
Indian manufacturers have also grumbled at being hollowed out by their Chinese rivals, but Mr. Gupta does not expect an unmanageable surge in protectionism.
“There is a good deal of anger about Chinese products, but there is also, deep down, an awareness in India that part of this is policy failings at their end,” he said.
India would stand a better chance of broadening the base of its exports to China, now dominated by commodities, if it eased labor laws that put manufacturers in a straitjacket.
More generally, southern economies are shooting themselves in the foot by levying much higher import duties on goods from other southern countries, 6.1 percent on average, than the 2.5 percent they face in the West, according to the Asian Development Bank.
Still, the bank, based in Manila, expects the south-south share of global trade to double in the next two decades.
With developing Asia accounting for about 75 percent of south-south commerce, and China alone taking up about 40 percent, the challenge for the BRICS is to divide the cake more evenly.
The trade share of Latin America and Africa is in fact rising fast, but that is because of China’s hunger for oil and raw materials, bought in exchange for low-cost consumer goods. Some China critics have branded this model of trade neocolonial.
One answer, the development bank says, would be to expand the production networks of “Factory Asia” to other regions in the south to churn out goods for price-sensitive local consumers.
“Not only will developing Asia’s foreign direct investment in these new networks enhance employment opportunities, raise workers’ incomes, increase domestic demand, and enhance growth prospects, it will also address in part global imbalances by recycling high savings in developing Asia into investment in the South,” the bank said in a report last week.
Simon Freemantle, who analyzes Africa’s political economy for Standard Bank in Johannesburg, said China was already repositioning itself as a “development partner” for Africa and learning the lessons from episodes of anti-Chinese sentiment.
Zambia recently dropped charges against two Chinese managers accused of attempted murder for firing at 11 coal miners during a protest over pay.
Despite such events, Africa is by and large receptive to booming Chinese trade and investment, Mr. Freemantle said.
The textile industry in South Africa and Botswana has taken a big blow, but across the continent, families can now afford new Chinese clothes instead of making do with Western hand-me-downs.
About four in five Nigerians and Kenyans in a recent BBC World Service poll welcomed China’s growing clout.
“All African countries view China’s increasing economic power positively,” the survey said. Standard Bank sees no let-up in the acceleration of commercial ties. By 2015, Chinese-African trade could easily exceed $300 billion, compared with $93 billion in 2009 and about $125 billion in 2010, Mr. Freemantle said.
And, as the BRICS summit meeting scheduled for this week shows, where trade goes, politics will follow, especially as economic power moves east in the wake of the global financial crisis.
“African countries are increasingly aware of this global shift and placing China in a more central role in their foreign policy objectives,” Mr. Freemantle said.
Alan Wheatley is a Reuters correspondent.
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