NEW DELHI, Oct 13: India and Brazil are looking at an “aspirational” target of increasing the two-way trade by over three-fold to USD 50 billion by 2030, Commerce Secretary Sunil Barthwal said today.
He was in Brasilia from October 1 to 4 to discuss ways to promote trade between the two countries. He chaired the sixth meeting of the India-Brazil Trade Monitoring Mechanism (TMM).
At present, the bilateral trade stood at USD 15.2 billion.
“We are looking at USD 30 billion in the next 3-4 years and by 2030, we are looking at an aspirational target of USD 50 billion. There is a huge potential for trade growth,” he told reporters here.
He added that during his visit, the two sides also discussed market access issues as well as new areas of cooperation.
Two working groups have been formed – market access issues and sectors of cooperation.
“Biofuels and renewables are important sectors which we will be looking at…Ethanol and biofuel blending is another area of cooperation,” he said.
Brazil has advanced technologies available for ethanol mixing with petrol and diesel.
“So that will help us in reducing our dependence on crude oil imports,” he said.
Further the two countries agreed to expand the existing preferential trade agreement between India and Mercosur, which is a trading bloc in Latin America, comprising Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.
“At present, there are 452 tariff lines (broad product categories) and now both the sides agreed that we should expand it to all the tariff lines where trade occurs,” Barthwal said.
Speaking at the media briefing, Director General Foreign Trade (DGFT) Santosh Kumar Sarangi said that the sixth round of talks for India-EU free trade agreement is scheduled to be held from October 16-20 in Brussels.
On Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), Additional Secretary in the commerce ministry Rajesh Agrawal said that the sixth round will be held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from October 15-24.
“In-depth text based negotiations will be held in Pillar-III (clean economy) and Pillar-IV (fair economy),” he said adding “most probably” talks on these two pillars will also be closed by October 25 and “we look forward to agreeing to a substantial closure in the ministerial meeting which is scheduled to be held on 13-14 November at San Francisco”.
IPEF was launched jointly by the US and other partner countries of the Indo-Pacific region on May 23 last year in Tokyo.
The framework is structured around four pillars relating to trade, supply chains, clean economy and fair economy (issues like tax and anti-corruption). India has joined all the pillars except the trade one.
Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, the US and Vietnam are members of the bloc. (PTI)
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