based on article by Luiz Antonio Alves Reporter Agência Brasil

Brasilia – It was a unique opportunity, just before a summit of heads of state, so a group of cognoscenti from Brazil, Russia, India and China (the BRICs) sat down for a serious discussion of, well, almost everything.
Participating in the high-level strategy session that will run from April 14 to 15, were the head (minister) of the Secretariat for Strategic Affairs, Samuel Pinheiro Guimarães; the secretary-general of the Foreign Ministry, Antonio Patriota; the ambassador of India in Brazil, B. S. Prakash; the vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Li Yang; and the director of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Vladimir Davydov.
The group pondered the Great Recession of 2008-2009, its causes and consequences. Another subject that certainly came up was the possibility that by 2050 the BRICs will be more powerful economically than today’s powerful G-6 (the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France and Italy) [that possibility was posited by Jim O’Neill, an economist who heads Goldman Sachs’ Global Economic Research unit. In 2001 he coined the term BRIC].
Marcio Pochmann, the president of the Applied Economic Research Institute (Ipea), who observed the meeting, told Agência Brasil that it was a chance to bring together the best in BRIC intelligence and knowledge. And that such a gathering would bear fruit in the form of information that would be passed on to the heads of state enabling them to make more informed decisions. “These talks are in tune with the challenges the world faces. The problems being discussed are common problems such as the environment, shifts in consumption around the world and in the BRICs, monetary issues and global governance,” explained Pochmann.

Allen Bennett – translator/editor The News in English