|
 The prime minister of Libya, El-Baghdadi Ali El-Mahmoudi, will pay a visit to Brazil late this month. According to information provided by the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Relations, El-Mahmoudi will arrive in the Brazilian capital Brasília on May 30th and meet leading government officials.
According to the press office at the Itamaraty, who will host the prime minister has not yet been defined. El-Mahmoudi's trip, still according to Itamaraty, will have commercial purposes, focusing on economic partnerships. Besides the federal capital, the Libyan leader should also visit other Brazilian cities.
Brazil already does business with the Arab country. Petrobras, the Brazilian state-owned petroleum company, has been operating in oil exploration and production in Libya since 2005. The Brazilian government also expressed, last month, its willingness to buy natural gas from Libya.
Brazil plans to build regasification plants, so it can buy the commodity from more distant regions, such as the Arab country, and thus replace imports from Bolivia.
Petrobras made a point of sending representatives to Libya and Algeria, in order to assess possibilities for importing. The gas would be transported in its liquid form, and then converted to the gaseous form in Brazil.
El-Mahmoudi has been the prime minister of Libya since March last year. During the three previous years, he was vice-prime minister in the country, and before that, he was the Libyan minister of Health.
Libyan trade with Brazil is on the rise. In the first three months this year, Brazilian exports to Libya saw a 71% increase. They went up from US$ 38.5 million, in the first quarter of 2006, to US$ 65.8 million in the same period this year. The increase was mainly due to the sale of an Embraer aircraft.
The aircraft accounted for US$ 27 million of total exports, followed by iron ore, with US$ 15.3 million, sugar, with US$ 12 million, and meats, with US$ 6.9 million. During the same period last year, iron ore was the first item in the export basket.
Libyan exports to Brazil have increased as well. The Arab country had revenues of US$ 266.9 million from exports to Brazil in the first three months of this year, compared with US$ 16 million during the same period in 2006.
The increase was led by crude oil, which accounted for US$ 252 million of total exports. In the first quarter of 2006, Brazil did not purchase oil from Libya, only naphtha for the petrochemical industry, and diesel, commodities that also appear in the export basket this year.
Oil answers to 95% of the country's exports and to one quarter of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The main commodities produced by Libyan industries also include iron, steel, processed foods, textiles, and cement. The country has a population of approximately six million people, which grows 2% per year.
Anba - www.anba.com.br
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.