A South African trade minister has voiced opposition to the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) at a recent meeting of the BRICS bloc of nations in Russia.
The EU’s CBAM, which imposes levies on goods which have manufacturing processes resulting in higher carbon emissions than equivalent goods in the bloc, has sparked a response from the African nation, which argues that the measure breaks WTO rules. South Africa has said it will seek talks with the EU on the changes.
The BRICS group – which includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE – and its importance could grow according to Bloomberg, which states that Malaysia has been backed by Russia to join.
Malaysia is not the only South East Asian nation looking to join the bloc. In May, Thailand announced its intention to join despite its current status as a treaty ally of the US, which has in recent years experienced rising tensions with China and Russia, the largest countries in BRICS.
The countries belonging to the bloc agreed to a communique following the Moscow meeting arguing that the WTO should give more attention to the interests of its developing economy members, and sets out opposition to alleged anti-competitive measures on trade that would limit their development.
The core of the agreement was a common approach to reviving the work of the WTO’s dispute settlement mechanism which has been suspended since the US began blocking the approval of new judges to the Appellate Body in 2019, which the organisation said was “grinding the dispute settlement system to a halt and throwing into doubt the WTO’s role in enforcing multilateral trade rules”.