Brazil's Lula, cooling to Chavez, heads to Camp David
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| Published on Saturday, March 31, 2007 |
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By Fabio Alves
BRASILIA, Brazil (Bloomberg): Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, seeking to bolster his nation's influence in Latin America, heads to Camp David Saturday for the first state visit to the US presidential retreat in 16 years by a leader from the region.
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| Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. AFP PHOTO |
In their second meeting this month, Lula and President George W. Bush will flesh out an agreement to boost ethanol production, aiming to reduce reliance on oil and curb the growing clout of Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez. The US and Brazil are the world's biggest producers of the biofuel.
Brazil, with an economy five times the size of Venezuela's, has struggled to maintain its leadership role in the region as Chavez uses surging oil revenue to build alliances with other Latin American governments and promote socialist plans at odds with US priorities such as free trade.
"As Lula cools to Chavez, he is forging closer ties with Bush," said Rubens Barbosa, Brazil's ambassador to the US from 1999 to 2004 and now head of a Sao Paulo economic consulting firm. "It's not in Brazil's interest to follow the anti-American, anti-globalization rhetoric." Lula, 61, is seeking to recoup a missed opportunity in his visit with Bush, 60, Barbosa said. His failure to cultivate US relations in his first four-year term accounts in part for the stagnant percentage of Brazilian products among US imports, little changed at 1.2 percent from 2002 through 2006.
Also topping the agenda is the Doha round of World Trade Organization talks, said Dan Fisk, senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the Bush's National Security Council.
The talks, named for the Qatar city where they began in 2001, resumed in January after breaking down last July as the US resisted further cuts in its farm subsidies unless India, the European Union and Japan agreed to steep cuts in their farm duties. "There's agreement that we have this window of opportunity and we have to take it," Fisk told reporters in Washington. "We do not think the differences are insurmountable and we think we can achieve a successful Doha round." Bush, who never mentioned Chavez's name during his recent five-country, six-day tour of Latin America, said that Lula is the kind of pragmatic socialist leader the US could cooperate with.
"As Brazil continues to realize the power of democracy and development at home, we'll look to it as a regional leader and a global partner to use its influence to help other young democracies around the world," US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice told journalists in Washington today.
Under Chavez, Venezuela has used its oil revenue to eclipse Brazil and Argentina as the de facto leader of South America, winning membership to the Mercosur trade group, promoting a regional development bank, and pushing a failed attempt to win a rotating seat on the United Nations Security Council.
After backing the winning presidential campaign of Evo Morales in Bolivia, Chavez last year supported Morales' efforts to raise taxes on foreign oil and gas operators such as state-owned Petroleo Brasileiro SA. Brazil eventually agreed to a 6 percent increase in the price of Bolivian gas, which accounts for more than half of the country's imports of the fuel.
Chavez, 52, has also challenged the morality of Lula's plans to boost biofuel production, saying the redirection of farmland will take food away from the poor.
Promoting biofuel is now a shared US-Brazilian interest that will help Lula gain leverage both at home and abroad, Christopher Garman, director for Latin America at Eurasia Group, said in a telephone interview from New York.
Brazil is the world's only major ethanol exporter and shipments may grow in eight years to as much as 15 billion liters (4 billion gallons) from about 4 billion liters now, Agriculture Minister Luis Carlos Guedes Pinto said in a March 5 interview. The country has produced ethanol from sugarcane for about 30 years.
The US, which makes most of its ethanol from corn, has a 54-cent-a-gallon levy on Brazilian ethanol. Bush, under pressure from agricultural interests, said the US Congress has to make any changes to the import duties.
Lula's diplomatic setbacks include a failure to get former Planning Minister Joao Sayad elected president of the Inter-American Development Bank in 2005, largely because the Bush administration backed a Colombian candidate.
Brazil also lost a 2005 bid to have its candidate chosen as director-general of the World Trade Organization. Brazil is still seeking support from developed countries, including the US, for a seat on United Nations Security Council.
The Mercosur trade group, which Brazil founded with Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, is in danger of splitting as Uruguay considers a free trade deal with the US Venezuela's Finance Minister Rodrigo Cabezas said March 19 that Mercosur members won't sign any trade agreements with the US.
Lula's invitation to the informal setting of rural Camp David underscores the importance of the relationship for both leaders, said Riordan Roett, head of Latin American Studies at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.
"It shows the US recognizes Brazil as the principal diplomatic actor in South America," he said.
The last Latin American leader to make a state visit to Maryland's Camp David was Carlos Salinas de Gortari, President of Mexico, in 1991. Brazil's then-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso was invited by President Bill Clinton in 1998 while on a personal trip to the US.
"It finally dawned on Lula that better relations with the US, besides opening up opportunities in trade with the biggest market in the world, will help Brazil play a more important role in the global political arena," said Marcos Azambuja, 71, a former Brazilian undersecretary of state.
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