Gov’t invites business to join in “reindustrialization” of Brazil

Brasilia, Jan 4 (EFE).- Vice President Geraldo Alckmin called Wednesday on the private sector to cooperate with the new government in designing an industrial policy that allows Brazil to be more than an exporter of raw materials.

The centrist former governor of Sao Paulo state, Brazil’s industrial heartland, made the appeal in his first speech as minister of Industry and Trade in the administration of center-left President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who said that he asked his vice president to assume the portfolio after failing to find a business leader willing to take the job.

Alckmin pointed to statistics showing that the proportion of manufactured goods among Brazil’s exports has declined from nearly 60 percent in the 1980s to 30 percent currently.

“The process of deindustrialization of the country is premature and grave, it acts against the present and compromises the future,” he said.

The government seeks to reach a consensus with business on “a modern policy of industrial development,” the vice president said.

That new policy must take into the account the “imperatives” of the present global reality while at the same time promoting “the use of clean technologies, with the aim of achieving a secure and sustainable productive process,” he said.

Alckmin pledged that the private sector will be able to turn to the state-owned development bank, BNDES, for credit lines to finance “economic and social development through a process that imparts dynamism to national industry.”

Such a process will result in a “greater presence” for Brazil in the international economy, he said.

“Manufactures have a value seven times greater than agricultural products” and the Lula administration regards boosting industry as one of the “great challenges” facing Brazil, Alckmin said.

Lula, a 77-year-old former autoworker and union leader, was sworn-in last Sunday for a third term as president. His first two terms, from 2003-2011, produced significant progress in reducing poverty and hunger.

The previous tenure of the Workers Party founder was marked both by opportunity in the form of a commodity boom, and by crisis: the international financial meltdown of 2008. EFE

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