Brazil’s government and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) reaffirmed their willingness to cooperate on various matters related to social and economic development during a series of meetings held on March 4-5 between a high-level delegation from the regional United Nations organization and Brazilian ministers and other authorities.
ECLAC’s Executive Secretary, Alicia Bárcena, headed the official mission to Brazil, the first since President Dilma Rousseff began her second term on January 1, with the aim of reinforcing the organization’s disposition to work jointly in areas where the new administration has a special interest in advancing.
The senior United Nations official held meetings with Brazil’s Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Mauro Vieira; Social Development and Fight Against Hunger, Tereza Campello; Planning, Nelson Barbosa; Science, Technology and Innovation, Aldo Rebelo; and Environment, Izabella Teixeira, who was accompanied by that Ministry’s Executive Secretary, Francisco Gaetani.
Alicia Bárcena also met with Marco Aurelio García, Special Adviser on Foreign Affairs to the Presidency of the Republic, and with Sergei Suarez, President of the Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada, IPEA (Institute for Applied Economic Research), a public federal foundation linked to the Presidency’s Secretariat of Strategic Affairs.
ECLAC’s Executive Secretary was accompanied by the Deputy Executive Secretary, Antonio Prado; the Officer-in-Charge of the Commission, Luis F. Yáñez; the Director of the Office in Brasilia, Carlos Mussi; and the Director of the Social Development Division, Laís Abramo.
At the meeting with the Brazilian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bárcena spoke of the support that ECLAC is providing to the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Union of South American Nations (Unasur), and she offered collaboration to cooperate with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on matters that it considers relevant.
During a conversation with Tereza Campello, the two sides agreed to set up a technical working group comprised of experts from ECLAC and from Brazil’s Ministry of Social Development to examine the different criteria used to measure poverty in terms of income. In addition, the officials proposed publishing a study that would systematize all the multiple experiences of managing social policies in Brazil’s federal State.
Additionally, Minister Campello was invited to participate in the first meeting of the Social Development Conference, a new subsidiary body of ECLAC, which will take place in Peru next October.
Meanwhile, Planning Minister Nelson Barbosa expressed his support for the work of ECLAC’s Latin American and Caribbean Institute for Economic and Social Planning (ILPES). In a meeting with representatives from this entity, officials agreed to develop joint research on the accumulation of wealth in the region and also hold numerous seminars jointly on timely issues in Latin America.
Separately, during a gathering with the Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, officials reviewed the cooperation between the United Nations organization and that department that led to the creation of the Conference on Science, Innovation and Information and Communications Technologies, an ECLAC subsidiary body that held its first meeting in 2014.
In addition, officials agreed to carry out joint research on institutional determinants of investment, and Aldo Rebelo was invited to participate in the Fifth Ministerial Conference on the Information Society in Latin America and the Caribbean to be held in Mexico in August.
Finally, during a meeting with the Environment Minister, officials reviewed challenges linked to the post-2015 development agenda and the XXI Conference of the Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which will take place in Paris in December, and discussed studies carried out by ECLAC on global warming.
