Address by Minister Ernesto Araújo at the 2020 Ministerial Council Meeting – October 28th 2020

Thank you very much, Madam Chair,

The guiding principles of Brazil’s foreign policy and foreign economic engagement are very aligned with the OECD: democracy, economic freedom and openness, efficient market economies, and public policies that contribute to welfare and sustainable development. We are determined to make a difference in the world in the defense and promotion of those purposes and ideas.

We want Brazil’s new role in the world to correspond to the profound transformation that President Jair Bolsonaro and his administration are promoting in the country, to overcome a system of political patronage based on a state-centered and closed economy and to replace it with real people-centered democracy, to fight corruption, to promote civil liberties, to fight the increasing threat of organized crime, to open the economy to the world and allow for a real market economy to thrive at home through a very ambitious unprecedented reform program, with strict fiscal responsibility, to promote sustainable development with the creation of green jobs as the only way to preserve natural resources.

We have not detracted from those purposes during the pandemic. On the contrary, after labor and pension reforms adopted previously, reforms to open the water and sanitation market and natural gas markets have been passed during the pandemic.

We are celebrating state-of-the-art trade and investment agreements, such as the Mercosur-European Union and Mercosur-EFTA agreements, as well as negotiating new agreements with South Korea and Canada. We have just concluded, with the United States, agreements on trade facilitation, good regulatory practices, and fight against corruption. At the WTO, we advocated comprehensive reform that will enable the organization to recover its original mission of liberalizing global trade on the basis of market economies. We are actively revisiting old dogmas and promoting new negotiating coalitions.

When the health crisis hit, Brazil took adequate measures to guarantee the daily livelihood of the most vulnerable, creating, in a matter of weeks, a program of emergency assistance that reached 60 million people, showing the quality of governance and technical capacity of the country.

During the pandemic, Brazil has not stopped its highly sustainable and very productive agribusiness sector. On the contrary, Brazilian agribusiness is able to feed 1.2 billion people without any damage to the rainforest, and we are ready to show this with data at the OECD, or any other venue.

We are discussing supply chains here. The problems that the pandemic has brought into light have, as their cause, the fact that, during 30 years, globalization ignored the question of democracy. If we do not work now to ensure the convergence of democracy and economic efficiency, our fundamental values are under serious threat. We have to talk about supply chain of goods but also supply chains of ideas. Where do the ideas and value scales that shape our thoughts come from? Are they conducive to our fundamental values or not?

To end, let me stress that Brazil wants to bring to the OECD, as a full member, this drive, this commitment to the fundamental values of the organization and its contribution to the current economic and existential challenges we all face. Brazil and the OECD must work together with a sense of urgency to start the accession process soon.