Path Breaking Mission

India, Brazil And South Africa (IBSA) On A Path Breaking Mission In The New World Order
By Dr Suvrokamal Dutta

In the face of challenging pressures to develop an reliable alternative option to globalization—one that emerges from a developing world to put to an end to global marginalization of the poor nations—there has been a new push to redefine political and economic arrangements in recent times. One component of these many recent initiatives is the idea of south-south cooperation

The emergence of the transatlantic links between India, South Africa and Latin America began when the leaders of three countries, India’s Vajpayee, Brazil’s Lula, and South Africa’s Mbeki spearheaded a new approach to south-south cooperation at the 2003 UN General Assembly Forum, resulting in a trilateral India-Brazil-South Africa agreement (IBSA).

According to the SAIIA, IBSA encompasses a total population of 1.3 billion people and an economy of $1.26 trillion. The First meeting of the foreign ministers of IBSA Dialogue Forum was held in New Delhi on March 4 and 5 2004. Issues addressed included social development, disarmament, infrastructure, health care, sustainable economic development, and poverty alleviation.

After successes in the Doha and Cancun rounds of the WTO summits, The heads of IBSA met for the first ever-trilateral summit recently at Brasilia just before the NAM summit. “As emerging economic giants in the developing world, India, Brazil and South Africa account for a combined gross domestic product (GDP) of over one trillion U.S. dollars and it seems set to push the number in an unexploited trilateral market" commented the South African Broadcasting Corporation

"We have a common understanding about what needs to be done, especially in areas like ICT (Information and Communications Technology) and telecommunication,"said Dupree Vilakazi, president of South Africa's National Black Business Council in the summit. The South African Foreign Ministry spokesman Ronnie Mamoepa said, “Since its establishment in 2003, the IBSA had become instrumental in promoting closer coordination on global issues between South Africa, India and Brazil. The three have become frequent guests of the annual gathering of the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized countries”. "The historic summit was the culmination of three Ministerial Trilateral Joint Commission meetings that have taken place in New Delhi (2004), Cape Town (2005) and Rio de Janeiro (2006), under the leadership of the three foreign ministers," he further said.