Interview: Improving Brazil-U.S. ties to be long, difficult: Brazilian expert

Improving strained diplomatic ties between Brazil and the United States will be "long and difficult," but beneficial for both sides, a Brazilian academic has said.

Marcos Prado Troyjo, director of the BRICLab at Columbia University, made the remarks in an interview with Xinhua when talking about Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff's upcoming meeting on Tuesday with her U.S. counterpart Barack Obama in Washington.

Rousseff left Brazil for New York on Saturday, kicking off a long-postponed visit to the United States at the invitation of Obama.

The meeting between the two leaders marks the first real step that both sides have taken to amend the relationship following revelations in 2013 that U.S. intelligence was spying on Rousseff and her top aides, as well as Brazilian oil giant Petrobras. Later, Rousseff embarrassed Washington by calling for global spying regulation at the United Nations.

"Government-to-government ties ... are oceans away from opportunities, and that's very bad," Troyjo said. "In trade, investment and defense, today, there are no initiatives riding between the two largest democracies in the Americas."

"In the unmet potential, Brazil has more to lose. We need to affirm, at the highest level, our willingness to work toward a trade treaty with the United States, whether it would be bilateral or multilateral," he said.

Troyjo expects to see a significant capital flow in the next year and a half, but through mergers and acquisitions "driven by a combination of factors, such as the relative size of Brazil's economy and the relatively lower price of Brazilian stocks due to the economic slowdown and devaluation of the real."

Other factors pushing for an improvement in ties have to do with a lack of progress at Mercosur in negotiating a trade deal with the European Union, which continues to remain uncertain, and a drop in the price of raw materials, which is forcing Brazil to seek alternative markets.

The U.S. market can provide Brazil with an opportunity to increase its exports of higher value-added products.

For the United States, said Troyjo, "it's impossible to underestimate Brazil, the Western Hemisphere's second-largest democracy and second-largest economy."

The two presidents are also meeting at a time when both face stiff political challenges at home. Rousseff is trying to implement unpopular belt tightening measures to cut public spending and Obama is struggling with a majority Republican Congress that doesn't necessarily back his foreign policy initiatives.

"Improving Brazil-U.S. ties will be long and difficult, but right now the most important thing is to push the 'restart' button," Troyjo said. Endi