Brazil Won’t Join China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Says Presidential Adviser

Brazilian ambassador and special adviser to the president Celso Amorim speaks during his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Brasilia, Brazil, on Aug.15, 2024. Photo by Evaristo Sa/AFP via Getty Images

Brazil seeks closer ties to Beijing but won’t sign on to China’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a top-ranking Brazilian official indicated on Monday.

Celso Amorim, chief adviser to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said: “The key word is synergy. It’s not about signing on, like an insurance policy.”

Amorim’s remarks were made in an interview with Brazil’s leading daily newspaper O Globo, published on Monday.

They came amid expectations that Brazil would join the BRI after years of discussion, and ahead of a November visit by Chinese leader Xi Jinping to Brazil for the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro.

Brazil is currently one of only three South American countries not taking part in the BRI. This summer, Lula said his administration had put together a proposal to join the BRI.

Amorim traveled to Beijing last week along with Lula’s chief of staff Rui Costa to discuss the initiative.

However, in Monday’s interview, Amorim said the two countries were not entering into a treaty but continuing negotiations, and signaled it would not be beneficial for Brazil to formally join the initiative.

“It is not a question of joining,” he said. “What matters is that these are projects that Brazil has defined and that may or may not be accepted by Beijing.”

BRI is estimated to have poured more than $1 trillion into nearly 150 countries, many of them developing nations, over the past 10 years, and experts have warned that the investment partnership forces nations into debt with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The interview came days after U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai spoke at an event in Sao Paulo, Brazil, urging Brazilian leadership to conduct a risk assessment of the CCP’s proposal. China’s state media quickly slammed Tai’s remarks as “disrespectful.”

Brazil and China currently enjoy a strong trade relationship, particularly in the area of agricultural products. Bilateral trade volume between the two countries reached almost $182 billion in 2023, a 6.1 percent increase year on year.

China is a primary destination for Brazilian agricultural exports, with $17.09 billion worth of agricultural products exported from Brazil to China in the first four months of 2024, according to Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock.

BRI Setbacks

Sydney-based think tank Lowy Institute reported earlier this year that major BRI projects have stalled, with the BRI spending less than half of what Beijing has pledged.

In Southeast Asia, the CCP spent $29.6 billion between 2015 and 2021, short of the projected $84.3 billion promised. Some observers say that the BRI has become Xi’s most expensive failure, one which could take down the CCP, which is currently facing a financial crisis.

According to the report, more than half of Beijing’s unfulfilled financing represents canceled and downsized projects, in part due to political instability, corruption, and weak governance.

Experts note that the BRI often results in smaller countries being indebted to the CCP, which then extracts financial, political, intelligence, or even military benefits from these BRI partners in return.

During a May congressional hearing on the BRI, David Trulio, president and CEO of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, pointed out that BRI partnerships have also coincided with the suppression of human rights.

“With deeper integration to [China] through the Belt and Road Initiative, that actually constrains those countries’ ability to behave in a way that advances human rights, because China has coercive pressure on them,” Trulio said.

“The concern has to do with dual use, or even as we heard, triple use. So a commercial port could have, potentially, intelligence collection implications, or it could have, potentially in a conflict, military uses.”

Last year, Italy pulled out of the BRI, dealing a major blow to the initiative as it was the only G7 nation that had participated in the project.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni told reporters that Italy had expected economic benefits including improved trade with China but that BRI did “not produce the results that were expected.” Meloni said that other countries that did not sign BRI deals with China had been able to maintain trade relations without it.

The Epoch Times reached out to the Brazilian government to confirm Amorim’s remarks but did not receive a response by publication time.