BRICS without substance

Grouping risks relevance as it fails to conclude significant pacts

The eighth summit of BRICS, the five-member grouping comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, ended in Goa on a familiar disappointing note. Keeping aside all that different BRICS members hope will be achieved in the future, the harsh truth is that the two-day event did not yield any tangible gains, except making the right political noises on almost everything under the sun, ranging from terror to urbanisation and climate change. For the most part, leaders ended up mouthing homilies about how the BRICS members should and could come together to each other's benefit. For instance, member-countries called for greater cooperation in curbing tax evasion and black money, an issue that is followed with immense interest in India. But instead of any concrete framework to make this happen, the members merely ended up affirming that "profit should be taxed in the jurisdiction where the economic activity is performed and the value is created".

This was not the only instance. In fact, none of the three issues that dominated the headlines was backed by an actual legal agreement. As a result, faced with India's worst performance on the exports front, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for the doubling of intra-BRICS trade to $500 billion by 2020. Chinese President Xi Jinping, too, chimed in agreement, saying, "Protectionism is rising and the forces against globalisation are an emerging risk". But that was it. On another important issue, the Goa Declaration, issued at the end of the summit, welcomed "experts exploring the possibility of setting up" an independent BRICS rating agency based on market-oriented principles, in order to further strengthen the global governance architecture. It does not commit to setting up such an agency, nor does it state that experts will find a way to set it up by a stipulated date. Rather, it says that experts will explore the possibility. Another issue, of BRICS members trading in their local currencies, on which there was a consensus that all members would benefit as trading costs would come down by six per cent, fell short of reaching fruition as well.

To be sure, the member states did sign three agreements: To set up a BRICS agricultural research platform; to strengthen interaction among customs administrations of member countries and among national development banks and the New Development Bank; and, to strengthen the BRICS inter-bank cooperation mechanism to help increase intra-BRICS trade, investments and business. But none of these is substantial enough to salvage the repeated failures of the BRICS countries in summit-level talks.

Each summit is approached with grandiose plans to change the global order and each meeting ends with achieving ever so little. At the start of this year's summit, China had mooted the idea of a free trade area for the bloc. It was claimed that such a move would constitute a "significant form of cooperation" among the countries and doing so would enable countries to remove tariff and non-tariff barriers, advance trade and liberalise investments among member-nations and boost growth at a time when global trade flows had decelerated faster than expected. Instead of any real achievement, the summit has ended with India "seeking" doubling of intra-BRICS trade. Yet another episode of BRICS leaders allowing the summit to end up as a talkfest is definitely nothing out of the ordinary, but it does beg the question if BRICS summits deserve to receive as much attention as they do.