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BRICS currency not on August summit agenda - South African official

Published: 2023-07-20 tag: 0

JSE:ISA

A BRICS currency will not be on the agenda of the bloc`s summit in South Africa next month, but Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa will continue to switch away from the U.S. dollar, South Africa`s senior BRICS diplomat said on Thursday.

JOHANNESBURG, July 20 (Reuters) - A BRICS currency will not be on the agenda of the bloc's summit in South Africa next month, but Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa will continue to switch away from the U.S. dollar, South Africa's senior BRICS diplomat said on Thursday.

"There's never been talk of a BRICS currency, it's not on the agenda," Anil Sooklal, South Africa's Ambassador at Large: Asia and BRICS, told a media briefing.

"What we have said and we continue to deepen is trading in local currencies and settlement in local currencies."

Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov are among BRICS leaders that touted the idea of a common currency as the bloc aims to challenge the western dominance of global finance amid Russia's sanctions-imposed exile after it invaded Ukraine last year.

This has pushed countries to find alternatives to the dollar, especially among non-U.S. allies.

However, India's foreign minister said earlier this month that currencies would remain "very much a national issue for a long time to come", while South Africa's central bank governor has pointed out that a common currency requires a banking union, a fiscal union and macroeconomic convergence.

"BRICS started a process that has been expedited as a result of the conflict, as a result of unilateral sanctions," Sooklal said. "The days of a dollar centric world is over, that's a reality. We have a multipolar global trading system today."

(This story has been corrected to say Thursday, not Wednesday, in paragraph 1)

Thomson Reuters

Rachel Savage is Africa Senior Markets Correspondent at Reuters, where she covers finance and economics across Sub-Saharan Africa, from sovereign debt crises and IMF programs to foreign exchange markets and cryptocurrencies. Previously she was LGBT+ Correspondent at the Thomson Reuters Foundation for just over three years and was awarded Journalist of the Year in 2021 by the NLJGA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists, a U.S. group. Before that, Rachel was based in Nairobi and then Lagos as an East and West Africa Correspondent for The Economist, after starting her career a decade ago as a business journalist in London.