MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

BRICS is the future, Bolivian FM says

Mayta underlined that the current BRICS countries do not base their economies on financial speculation

Bolivian Foreign Minister Rogelio Mayta insisted Sunndnay that his country was looking out “to the future and the future is BRICS,” the bloc made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, to which six new members including Argentina will join effective Jan. 1, 2024.

Mayta insisted that “it must be clear” that the group brings together more than 40% of the world's population and more than 30% of its GDP. Bolivian President Luis Arce Catacora formally submitted Bolivia's application to join the alliance on July 12, last.

“Bolivia is looking to the future and the future, at this moment, are the BRICS, that must be clear,” Mayta said in a TV interview.

It is a complex process and one that takes time; in fact, Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates, which will join the BRICS in 2024, took their first steps towards joining the group in 2015. However, “We are going fast,” Mayta stressed.

He also forecasted that the bloc would become more relevant in the coming years because, in addition to possessing important natural resources, it has the technology to which Bolivia could also have access.

Based on a recent report by the Mexican newspaper Jornada, Mayta pointed out that the BRICS, with its new members - Argentina, Egypt, Iran, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Ethiopia - will have an impact on 80% of the world's hydrocarbon production.

For Mayta, this block of nations that have been unified since 2009, has a “gravitating” and “specific” weight that constitutes a counterweight to the United States to break the hegemony that the latter exerts on a global scale after World War II.

Mayta also underlined the fact that the current BRICS countries do not base their economies on “financial speculation,” unlike the US, which also uses the dollar “as a strategic weapon” to sanction other countries. Hence the importance of BRICS deciding to form the New Development Bank to promote transactions in currencies other than the US dollar.

“This does not mean that the dollar is no longer important now, but we probably need other currencies to trade, lest the United States gets angry and sanctions a country and there are no medicines, there is nothing in that country because everything is traded in dollars,” he explained.