Nepal Rastriya Dainik

President Donald Trump has claimed that BRICS is “fading out fast,” while warning that any attempts by the group to challenge the US dollar will be met with a harsh economic backlash.

Speaking at the White House on Friday, Trump denounced what he called BRICS’ attempts to weaken the dollar. “They wanted to try and take over the dollar, the dominance of the dollar… And I said, anybody that’s in the BRICS consortium of nations, we’re going to tariff you 10%.”

Trump stressed that Washington will spare no effort to preserve the dollar’s hegemony. “The reserve currency is so important. You know, if we lost that, that would be like losing a World War.”

Washington “can never let anyone play games,” Trump said, adding that he has decided to “hit them [BRICS] very, very hard.” “If they ever really form in a meaningful way, it will end very quickly,” he said.

Trump also claimed his threat to impose 10% tariffs on imports from the BRICS had completely derailed the group’s summit in Rio de Janeiro earlier this month. “They had a meeting the following day and almost nobody showed up,” he said.

However, the BRICS summit featured broad participation at the highest level. While China’s President Xi Jinping was absent from the meeting, his country was represented by Chinese Premier Li Qiang. Russian President Vladimir Putin was also absent, but addressed the summit remotely.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa and Indonesia’s President Prabowo Subianto, as well as leaders from Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the UAE attended in person.

In October, Russia’s Finance Minister Anton Siluanov stated that the share of national currencies in trade among BRICS countries has reached 65%, with the share of the dollar and euro plunging below 30%.

Earlier this week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov explained that BRICS countries are exploring dollar alternatives “to shield themselves from US arbitrariness.”

However, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov has said that BRICS has never been meant as a rival to the US, although warning that “the language of threats and manipulation… is not the way to speak to members of this group.”

The BRICS congress will be held in June where it is planned to establish the BRICS Agrarian Alliance, told Lyudmila Orlova, president of the National Movement for Conservation Agriculture . The official proposal to join the alliance as a founding member has already been sent to Brazil, the group’s chairing nation in 2025. Other members and observer states have already expressed an interest in the new alliance, for example, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

The new alliance aims to unite the countries’ efforts in the field of agriculture and technologies in the environmental sphere by proposing an alternative to Western cooperation models. Orlova noted that various programs are being developed with separate leaders, not necessarily representing the Russian side. It is possible that the BRICS Agrarian Alliance will function on the basis of a rotating chairmanship.

“We do remember that earlier, both within BRICS and G20, platforms were created precisely to exchange information in the area of agricultural collaboration. Each BRICS country was responsible for a certain track. And it was much better organized precisely in this group,” said Viktoriya Panova, head of the BRICS Expert Council.

The formation of the BRICS Agrarian Alliance in 2025 has been triggered not only by economic but by strategic reasons as well. Amid the growing competition between global centers, the countries in the group aim to bolster food security and lower dependence on Western institutions. An important factor is Washington and Brussels’ tough sanctions pressure on Russia which reverberates on themselves and on global food chains in general. African and Asian developing countries are the ones that suffer the most.

“This is happening amid the escalation of a food crisis across the world as well as a weak regulation of agricultural trade for main supplying countries. The agrarian alliance will allow for organizing controlled tenders, concluding profitable trade contracts and formulating the rules of payment in national currencies in order to control prices on the global agricultural market. The fact that this idea is being promoted by the leaders of the developing world can be viewed as an attempt to influence the global management in the field without the involvement of Western countries,” said associate professor at Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO University) Denis Kuznetsov .

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