The 17th BRICS Summit in Brazil is set to be a historic event as participants address issues of global concern including trade, which has been made urgent under the current international situation, said the president of the new BRICS Committee.
Brazil will host the 2025 BRICS Summit from July 6 to 7 in Rio de Janeiro. The gathering will focus on tackling global challenges and strengthening economic and strategic cooperation among member nations.
The founding members - Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa - will work to strengthen BRICS cooperation alongside six newly admitted members: Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia. Ten partner countries will participate with observer status: Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Vietnam, Uganda, and Uzbekistan.
Pedro Vormittag, a lawyer with a background in international affairs, is presiding over Rio de Janeiro's new BRICS Committee. He said in an interview with China Global Television Network (CGTN) that the committee is heading up preparations for what's expected to be a historic summit.
"It is hard to think of a time in history over the past decades in which the agenda was so ambitious, and the answers were so urgent. No matter what the outcome is going to be, it is going to be a historic meeting," Vormittag said.
This will be the first summit under BRICS' expanded format. According to the committee president, the group's enlargement is significant at a time when global trade tensions have never been higher.
"There is a very big concern about trade. In other words, how is it that the countries that are part of BRICS are going to improve and actually increase the level of trade and the level of business at large that they can have with each other. So now that the global context is actually making these questions more urgent, I think BRICS has been prepared to address these issues for a while now," he said.
With one of the world's biggest diplomatic events coming to Rio de Janeiro, many onlookers anticipate important solutions emerging from intense negotiations among the BRICS countries.
Held under the slogan "Strengthening Global South Cooperation for More Inclusive and Sustainable Governance," Vormittag said this year's BRICS summit also aims to elevate Rio de Janeiro's profile as a tourist destination.
"A very concrete example is, we would like to massively expand the amount of Chinese tourists and visitors or the amount of Chinese scholars in our universities, the amount of Chinese businesspeople that come to Rio to do business," he said.
BRICS summit in Rio marks historic event amid turbulent global context: official
