OREANDA-NEWS. June 19, 2009. Yekaterinburg played host to the first full-blown BRIC summit involving President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev, PRC President Hu Jintao, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on June 16. The meeting at the highest level marked the successful conclusion of an important formative stage of dialogue in this promising format.

During the meeting the leaders of the Four held a trustful and constructive exchange of views focused on the BRIC countries’ role in dealing with fundamental global problems and in consolidating their common contribution to international efforts to overcome the present crisis and to reform the world financial and economic system.

The leaders substantively discussed progress achieved in the anti-crisis process in the G20, and the prospects for the G8’s dialogue with the traditional partners (among them Brazil, India and China) on a broad range of themes, including reformation of international financial institutions, the assurance of global energy, food and climate security, and development assistance.

The tasks were defined whose solution will help to bring international cooperation in all these areas to a qualitatively new level and to achieve progress in the endeavor of shaping an equitable world architecture.

There was reiterated the mutual interest in building up the quadripartite collaboration in different multilateral entities and in deepening further the many-sided cooperation within the BRIC framework.

At the summit’s close the leaders’ joint statement was adopted, reflecting a holistic vision of the present stage in world development and of ways to surmount the global crisis. The ministerial statement on global food security, endorsed at the summit, fixes the prospects for closer joint work by our countries toward this end on international platforms, like UN and FAO, particularly on the issues of practical realization of the measures agreed upon at the World Grain Forum in St. Petersburg.

The successful holding of the first full-blown BRIC summit in Yekaterinburg bore witness to the need for such a mechanism of combining the interests of the BRIC countries as important centers of world economic and political development in dealing with key issues of the global agenda, and imparted a new impulse to the reinforcement of collective and legal elements in international affairs. An example of equal dialogue and mutually advantageous cooperation among leading states of the world is thus being formed.

It has been decided to make BRIC summits regular and to continue the practice of annual meetings of foreign and finance ministers. The joint statement by leaders of the four countries welcomes Brazil’s offer to hold the next BRIC summit in 2010.