Speech by Minister Antonio de Aguiar Patriota on the ocasion of the Fifteenth Meeting of the Caribbean Council for Foreign and Community Relations (COFCOR) – Paramaribo, May 4, 2012

Let me begin by thanking you all for the privilege of taking part in this meeting today.

I bring you a renewed message of my Government’s commitment to long-term partnership with the Caribbean region.

On February 2011, I had the honor to participate as a special guest at the 22nd Inter-Sessional Meeting of the Heads of Government of CARICOM, in Grenada.

Since then, more than a year has gone by, and I welcome this opportunity to meet again with CARICOM.

We have maintained high levels in trade between Brazil and CARICOM, with an overall total of over US$ 4.5 billion in 2011.

Encouraged though we are by figures such as this, we recognize the imbalanced nature of our current trade relationship. Brazil has committed to finding ways to mitigate this circumstance. A study was carried out in 2011 on “Opportunities for CARICOM Exports to the Brazilian Market”. An English version of the study, which identifies Caribbean products with a potential to expand exports to Brazil, will soon be released.

In the same spirit, we have been working to improve air connections between the Caribbean and Brazil. There is already a direct flight between São Paulo and Barbados, which continues to have a very positive impact on tourism and on overall commercial – as well as human – relations within the region. Air connections are crucial for effective regional integration.

Since the flight to Barbados was introduced, nearly two years ago, new possibilities and demands have appeared. We have invited the Inter-American Development Bank and CARICOM to send a team of experts to Brazil to devise a legal framework that will allow for “open skies” between Brazil and CARICOM countries.

Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends,

Despite the strong economic turbulence in the world economy, we have also been able to move forward in our cooperation initiatives.

While we in Brazil have been compelled to make difficult budgetary decisions, the core of what we can share with the Caribbean has been preserved.

The experience we can pass on through technical cooperation initiatives is sure to contribute to the tackling of several important issues in the region.

In the past 12 months, Brazil and CARICOM have deepened their cooperation, mainly in the agricultural sector.

In this period, ten specific actions have been implemented in personnel training involving all countries of the Caribbean Community, always under the coordination and funding of the Brazilian Cooperation Agency, known as “ABC” (its acronym in Portuguese). 88 experts from every one of the 14 CARICOM countries have benefited from this effort, with an important multiplying effect.

In the context of our continued cooperation, I wish to thank the representative of Trinidad and Tobago for his Government’s disposition to host, on behalf of CARICOM, a model-farm to be implemented by EMBRAPA – the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation –, with the financial support of the Brazilian Cooperation Agency. Soon, a team of EMBRAPA experts will head to Port of Spain on a mission to take stock of conditions and evaluate costs so as to plan future action.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Brazil believes in applying internationally the same set of values we uphold in our own national experience. We have built a democratic society that is structurally mindful of human rights. We work to promote growth in our economy without leaving behind those who are in a less favorable situation. On the contrary, we have learned, in practice, that social inclusion, besides being a moral imperative, is also sound economic policy, in so far as it creates powerful domestic markets.

While focusing on our own remaining internal challenges – which we do not underestimate –, we are also highly concerned with the issue of food security worldwide.

This is why we placed much effort in electing Dr. José Graziano da Silva to the position of Director General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization – and I thank all of you, once again, for your valuable support. We need a FAO that is fully apt to promote food security and to mobilize the most adequate resources to combat hunger in the world.

At the same time, Brazil has been developing policies and practices to face the food security challenge – policies and practices we are ready to continue to share in the form of international cooperation.

We have learned from experience that improving and promoting small scale farming is key.

As a result of our “Family Agriculture” policies, as we call them, today 80% of what Brazilians eat come from small scale farms.

This achievement was made possible in a decade. We have implemented a program in which the Government seeks to stimulate the so-called “weak linkages” of the food-producing sector.

The realization that such progress is actually viable is particularly relevant when many nations, including Caribbean ones, are highly dependant on food imports.

The good news is that Brazilian programs in this area are compatible with Caribbean reality. They have been conceived to strengthen food security from a small-scale approach, as they are based on the idea of promoting production in municipal communities, integrating all partners in sustainable cycles that involve small farms, local schools, hospitals and the private sector in the community area, such as hotels.

Through technical cooperation in these fields, our aim is to help Governments increase food production and enhance food security.

To fulfill this objective, Brazil is ready to offer CARICOM countries know-how and its best practices in areas such as genetic treatment on a variety of species, cultivation methods, irrigation and yielding technology as well as training in farming equipment, animal husbandry and their sub-products, among others.

Furthermore, there are also important social policies directed to form and organize cooperatives in a way that small farmers may add value to their production without bulky investments or high-end technology.

The Brazilian Ministry of Social Development, as well as that of Agrarian Development, will be ready to provide, over the next months, specific courses in Brazil for CARICOM representatives in order to share with you, whenever there is interest, our policies and the experience we have acquired in this critical area.

More broadly, we will be offering in Brazil, starting August 27, a five-day course for foreign Government officials in the area of public social policies.

I have in my delegation today a representative of the Ministry of Social Development who will be more than happy to try and address questions you may wish to raise about these and other cooperation possibilities.

Dear colleagues,

Our political dialogue has also become more systematic and more diversified over the past years.

The opening of Brazilian embassies in every Caribbean capital has played a key role in this process. The Brazilian diplomatic missions in all 14 member countries of the Community have allowed us to enrich our mutual understanding and to ensure straightforward communication between our Governments.

On this note, I take the opportunity to acknowledge the opening of the Jamaican Embassy in Brasília and, at the same time, I wish to encourage other CARICOM members, who have not yet done so, to move in the same direction.

I have instructed my team to carry out frequent visits to the Caribbean region in order to meet with local governments and societies, and I myself plan to visit other Caribbean countries later this year.

We are determined to continue to build upon the framework established in April 2010, at the First Brazil-CARICOM Summit, in Brasília. We are following the roadmap established at that pivotal meeting.

There remain outstanding tasks ahead of us. For instance, we still need to turn into reality the political consultation mechanism established in the Brasilia Declaration.

Likewise, as I have discussed with some of you on previous occasions, we need to organize a ministerial meeting in preparation for the Second Brazil-CARICOM Summit, which could take place some time in 2013.

Yet much has already been done over the last two years.

Mutual discovery of our common heritage was one of the main objectives of the Declaration stemming from the 2010 Summit. The Declaration of Brasília recommended the conduct of studies on slavery and its impact on the formation of our cultures, so as to assign the proper value to the African roots of our shared history.

It was in the intent of meeting this mandate that the Brazilian Government held a series of lectures on the subject, as a part of the Ibero-American Meeting of the Afro-descendent Peoples held last November in Salvador, in the State of Bahia. The lectures were given by the same 15 scholars (one from each CARICOM country and one Brazilian) that contributed with essays to the book “The African Heritage in Brazil and the Caribbean”, which we took the initiative of publishing in 2011, also as a follow-up to the Brasília Declaration.

The bonds that unite us are plenty, and they also include common challenges in a fast-changing international arena.

Common challenges are better dealt with in a coordinated fashion.

That is why we attach such high value to meetings like this one. That is also why we are truly enthusiastic about the potential of the recently-established Community of Latin America and Caribbean States – CELAC.

Distinguished colleagues,

Before concluding, allow me to refer to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, which we will be hosting in Rio de Janeiro this coming June.

On behalf of President Dilma Rousseff, I would like to reiterate the invitation for your Heads of Government, and yourselves, to attend the Rio+20 Summit.

The summit, twenty years after the first historic conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and ten years after the 2002 Johannesburg summit, is a crucial opportunity to advance the commitments of the world community regarding some of the major challenges of the 21st century.

The 1992 Conference in Rio was a point of arrival. Rio+20 will be the point of departure for the establishment of a new paradigm of development – one that can prove sustainable in its social, economic and environmental dimensions.

This is a major defining issue of our time, affecting all of us and generations to come.

No decision about a new paradigm of development will be viable without a truly representative participation of the international community at large.

We count on the decisive contribution of your Governments to ensure the success of that UN common effort. It will also be the success of each one of our societies.

Thank you very much.