Bolivia’s Foreign Minister Rogelio Mayta announced Monday that the nation’s socialist president, Luis Arce, will attend the upcoming BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, hoping to join the China-led trade bloc.
According to Mayta, Arce will attend the trade and security bloc’s summit at the invitation of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. The Bolivian president will seek investment and partnership opportunities to help boost Bolivia’s exports and nascent lithium industry after signing contracts in June that gave away control of two of the country’s largest lithium deposits to China and Russia.
BRICS is a diplomatic and economic coalition made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
Bolivia is home to some of the world’s largest known lithium resources at 21 million tons, but the South American nation has almost no industrial production or commercially viable reserves. Lithium is an indispensable material for manufacturing electric vehicle batteries and batteries used in a wide range of devices.
Mayta said at a press conference on Monday:
President Arce is honored to be able to contribute to the dialogues on the integration and development of the global south, sharing this space with the presidents of economies of emerging countries that represent 40 percent of the world’s population and more than 30 percent of the current global GDP.
Mayta reiterated Bolivia’s “willingness and interest” to join the BRICS coalition, explaining that the Bolivian government issued a letter in June addressed to the five presidents of the bloc’s founding members. According to Mayta, the Bolivian government asserted that it “shares a common vision regarding an international order founded on equality, solidarity, inclusion, consensus, mutually beneficial cooperation, and multilateralism, without hegemonies.”
“We seek to move towards sustainable, inclusive development and to strengthen cooperation ties with these emerging economies,” Mayta continued.
The trade bloc is reportedly holding talks to admit new members and expand the group and will discuss the matter in the upcoming August 22-24 summit in Johannesburg. South Africa’s ambassador to the group, Anil Sooklal, claimed in July that more than 40 countries have allegedly expressed interest in joining BRICS, including Argentina, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Comoros, Gabon, and Kazakhstan.
“We have made multiple efforts with the five member countries,” Mayta said on Monday in a message on Twitter. “We know that it is a long process, but we are on the right path, working hard for the country.”
The Bolivian foreign minister continued:
In addition, with the largest reserves of lithium in the world, Bolivia hopes to achieve strategic alliances with the objective of promoting technology, the necessary financing for the sovereign industrialization of this energy resource, as well as to guarantee the market for Bolivian products with added value derived from lithium, in the emerging markets constituted by the BRICS and by friendly countries that, like Bolivia, aspire to its incorporation.
Arce, on behalf of Bolivia, signed two contracts with Russian and Chinese companies in June, totaling $1.4 billion, to build two lithium carbonate processing plants in Bolivia. The two contracts follow another one also signed in June between Bolivia and the Chinese battery company CATL to build two lithium plants in the country’s Uyuni and Oruno salt flats. In March, Arce, whose government expects to be able to export up to 75,000 tons of lithium by 2025, claimed that Bolivia’s lithium was allegedly “threatened” by an “international right wing.”
Last month, during the 62nd Summit of Heads of State of the Mercosur trade bloc in Puerto Iguazú, Arce made calls to drop the U.S. dollar to conduct trade in favor of the Chinese yuan and local currencies. The Bolivian president also proposed seeking “strategic alliances with other international actors, such as China, in a Eurasian and Asian bloc which, organized in the BRICS and other integration mechanisms,” are “projected as spaces for the construction of a new world economic order.”
China’s state-run newspaper Global Times reported last week that Bolivia had started using the yuan for trade settlements.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.