Lula: I'll make sure Brazil-Africa cooperation continues

Maputo, Agency
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said Wednesday in Maputo that he would be the guarantor that his country's cooperation with Africa will continue after he leaves office in January.

"Brazil's policy (of cooperation) with Africa, and in particular with Mozambique, will continue and will strengthen itself with the president-elect, Dilma Rousseff," Lula said at an official banquet offered for him by the president of Mozambique, Armando Guebuza.

Lula emphasized the good relations between Brazil and Africa, where the South American country has 34 embassies in the continent's 53 nations, and he added that his successor, Rousseff, "has the same commitments as I do with Africa."

The Brazilian leader has been in Maputo since Tuesday on his last scheduled presidential visit to Africa, a continent to which he has traveled about a dozen times over the eight years of his administration and where he has visited about 30 countries.

In his speech, Lula said that for centuries the Africans and Latin Americans have looked, first to Europe and then to the United States, "and it's high time that we look a little bit to ourselves also," a reference to the need for development among the countries of both regions.

He also expressed Brazil's predilection for Africa, given that the South American giant is the country outside Africa with the largest black population, and he insisted that he had wanted to make his last presidential visit to the continent to Mozambique because it is a Portuguese-speaking country just as is Brazil.

In 2003, when Lula came to power, trade between Brazil and Africa totaled $5 billion and by 2009 it had surpassed $29 billion.

After this visit to Mozambique, Lula will continue his trip to Seoul, to the G-20 Summit, a group of 20 developed and emerging countries, where he will propose multilateral measures to do away with currency wars, in which some nations, such as the United States and China, have engineered the devaluation of their currencies to favor their exports.

This measure, however, has especially hurt the emerging countries, whose currencies thus have been artificially strengthened, a situation that seriously hampers their exports.