In recent years, the Brazil-China trade relationship has successfully benefited from a complementary agenda with few parallels in the world. China is Brazil’s largest trade partner and the destination for over 30% of Brazilian exports – mainly iron ore, soybeans and crude oil. However, recent shifts in Brazil’s trade agenda reflect broader structural challenges facing China’s trading partners – the need to diversify and increase value-added exports rather than relying on raw materials.

The speed of technological transformations, the fragmentation of global value chains and the increasing imperative for low-carbon, sustainable products presents a set of opportunities for Brazil to re-imagine its path to development by exploring global and regional dynamics that can promote structural domestic transformations.

This session will launch the Lau China Institute’s first policy paper for 2022, in partnership with the Brazil Institute and CEBRI. Our panel will discuss the prospects and challenges for Brazil-China trade in the context of broader shifts in the global economy and explore the implications for China’s other trading partners.

Panelists

• Vinicius Carvalho, Brazil Institute
• Zeno Leoni, War Studies
• Tatiana Rosito Senior Fellow, Brazilian Center for International Relations
• Chair - Hannah Bretherton, Lau China Institute