The first meeting of the BRICS Contact Group on Economic and Trade Issues (CGETI) was held under the Chairship of India from March 9 to 11.
Key Points
- India presented the calendar of events for BRICS CGETI 2021, which included the priority areas for deliverables, schedule, and scope of the MSME roundtable conference workshop on Services Statistics, and the BRICS Trade Fair.
- Now inter-sessional deliberations will be carried out till September to reach a consensus amongst the BRICS countries.
- The deliverables proposed are on (i) BRICS Cooperation on Multilateral Trading system including cooperation for the TRIPS Waiver proposal at WTO; (ii) Action plan based on the document “Strategy for BRICS Economic Partnership 2025” adopted during Russian Presidency in 2020 (iii) Framework for Consumer Protection in E-Commerce; (iv) Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary (SPS) Working Mechanism; (v) Non-Tariff Measures (NTM) Resolution Mechanism; (vi) Co-operation framework for the protection of Genetic Resources and Traditional Knowledge; (vii) BRICS Framework on Co-operation in Professional Services. Each of these sessions was followed by detailed feedback sessions.
- The 27th official level CGETI meeting is scheduled to be held in June 2021.
13th BRICS Summit
The 13th BRICS Summit will be hosted by India under Narendra Modi. The theme of BRICS this year is -“BRICS at 15: Intra BRICS Cooperation for Continuity, Consolidation, and Consensus.
