(WND)—A former chief economist with Goldman Sachs has said the possibility of BRICS overtaking the U.S. economy is closer to a fantasy than reality, because two of the main players in the alliance have a tenuous relationship at best.
Economist Jim O’Neil, who first coined the term BRICS in 2001, told Reuters the idea BRICS being a genuine global club is “out there with the fairies” and “not feasible.”
“The idea that the BRICS can be some genuine global economic club, it’s obviously a bit out there with the fairies in the same way that the G7 can be, and it’s very disturbing that they see themselves as some kind of alternative global thing, because it’s obviously not feasible,” O’Neill said.
BRICS was first formed in 2009 in the wake of the 2008 global recession and originally had four member states – Brazil, Russia, India, and China. It has grown substantially over the past 20 years, adding South Africa in 2010, and since then has grown to include Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, and Egypt.
According to O’Neil, BRICS as a group has not achieved much over the past 15 years, and added the alliance is more symbolic than anything.
“It seems to me basically to be a symbolic annual gathering where important emerging countries, particularly noisy ones like Russia, but also China, can basically get together and highlight how good it is to be part of something that doesn’t involve the U.S. and that global governance isn’t good enough,” O’Neil said.
The relationship between China and India – the two economic powerhouses of the group – has been mired with disputes over territory over recent years. O’Neil said he would take the alliance seriously when both countries are actually able to work together effectively.
“I will take the BRICS group seriously when I see signs that the two countries that really matter – China and India – are actually really trying to agree on things, rather than effectively trying to confront each other all the time,” O’Neil said.
Tensions could be beginning to ease between China and India, however, after China’s President Xi Jinping and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to an agreement over the long-running border disputes on Wednesday.
According to the Associated Press, the two leaders met for the first time in five years and this could spell the end of a four-year standoff between their respective militaries along their shared Himylayan border, which China has laid claim to.
“It’s important for both sides to shoulder our international responsibilities, set an example for boosting the strength and unity of the developing countries, and contribute to promoting multi-polarization and democracy in international relations,” Xi said.
India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri told reporters the pact will have a positive impact on regional and global peace and prosperity. However, he did not detail how exactly the border dispute would be resolved, and if the tens of thousands of troops still stationed there would be pulled back.
“The two leaders affirmed that stable, predictable, and amicable bilateral relations between India and China, as two neighbors and the two largest nations on earth, will have a positive impact on regional and global peace and prosperity,” Misri said.
Met President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Kazan BRICS Summit.
India-China relations are important for the people of our countries, and for regional and global peace and stability.
Mutual trust, mutual respect and mutual sensitivity will guide bilateral relations. pic.twitter.com/tXfudhAU4b
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) October 23, 2024
#WATCH | Prime Minister Narendra Modi holds a bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Kazan, Russia on the sidelines of the BRICS Summit.
(Source: DD News/ANI) pic.twitter.com/WmGk1AlSwW
— ANI (@ANI) October 23, 2024
#WATCH | Kazan, Russia: During the bilateral meeting with PM Modi, Chinese President Xi Jinping says, "It's my great pleasure to meet you in Kazan. It's the first time for us to have a formal meeting in five years time. Both the people in our two countries and the international… pic.twitter.com/NCUm2DVmQY
— ANI (@ANI) October 23, 2024
Russian President Valdimir Putin seemed confident BRICS would continue to expand, and stated on Wednesday there are over 30 countries currently wanting to join BRICS, according to a report from DP International.
“It would undoubtedly be wrong to ignore the unprecedented interest of the countries of the Global South and east in strengthening their contacts with BRICS,” Putin said.
The summit’s agenda is breaking away from Western-led financial institutions, reducing the reliance on the U.S. dollar and the influence of the SWIFT system. Putin reportedly wants stronger financial bonds between the members.
Putin said Wednesday the U.S. dollar is being used as a weapon, adding he does not reject using the dollar but feels forced to look for an alternative, because Russia is not able to work with U.S. dollars.
“The [U.S.] dollar is used as a weapon, it is true and we see that. I think it is a great mistake by those who do it, since the use of the dollar, which is still the most important tool in global finance, and its use as a political tool undermines trust in this currency, thereby reducing its capabilities. We are not the ones who do that. It’s others. We are not rejecting the dollar or fighting against it, but if they don’t let us work with it, what else should we do? We should seek other alternatives and this is exactly what we do,” Putin said.
JUST IN: ?? Russian President Putin says it's a "great mistake" to use the US dollar as a weapon. pic.twitter.com/4J3KU1Z6U7
— BRICS News (@BRICSinfo) October 23, 2024
Ulrich Schmid, professor of Russian studies at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, told France 24’s Eve Irvine the West should not overestimate the significance of the BRICS summit because the member states have clashing agendas, making any real progress slow.
“We do have very diverging agendas among the member states. So, for instance, Russia and Iran are extremely interested to create alternative trade platforms, alternative payment systems to evade the heavy sanctions they’re under … At the same time we have other countries who are just in favor of multilateral world orders, such as Brazil or India, and they at the same time want to continue to have very good relations also with Western countries, including the United States,” Schmid said.
Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
