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Brazil is getting ready for the Carnival this weekend, when the country literally comes to a halt, but hectic preparations are underway in Brasilia for President Lula da Silva’s upcoming visit to India with a business delegation of 260 companies.
The largest-ever Brazilian delegation to India marks the culmination of the highest-level engagement between the two countries over the past few years — in a challenging geopolitical scenario. This could also be the Brazilian leader’s last major foreign engagement before Brazil gets into election mode for the presidential polls in October this year.
Following Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bilateral meeting with Lula in Brasilia in July 2025, when they discussed the expansion of bilateral trade, the Brazilian leader’s trip to New Delhi, from February 19 to 21, is being given top priority by the Brazilian government.
Celso Amorim, who serves as Lula’s principal foreign policy adviser, sees the visit as an opportunity for collaboration in strategic sectors between two emerging economies. “Cooperation between Brazil and India can be very broad, but I would highlight above all two domains: technology and defence,” Mr. Amorim told The Hindu.
“Brazil and India have developed, each in its own way, very important aspects of biotechnology too. In space science, India has given us a great example of how it is possible to achieve great accomplishments without necessarily resorting to the technology of the rich countries,” said Mr. Amorim, who has earlier served as Foreign Minister and Defence Minister under Presidents Lula and Dilma Rouseff, respectively.
Since the 2025 bilateral meeting, the Brazilian side has been working to strengthen its trade ties with India. Jorge Viana, head of the Brazilian Trade and Investment Promotion Agency (Apex Brazil), told The Hindu that Lula asked him last year to put together a delegation as part of his efforts to expand commercial ties with India.
“In Delhi, the President will participate in the Artificial Intelligence summit, but we are also organising a huge business meeting in collaboration with our Foreign Ministry. Apex is also opening an office in Delhi as we see India, the most populous nation, as one of the economies with the greatest potential for growth,” Mr. Viana told The Hindu from Brasília. “Till last year, India was our 10th biggest trading partner, but now in recent months it has been competing to be the fifth. It could become the third biggest.”
In 2025, Brazil purchased Indian products worth $8.5 billion, while Brazilian exports to India totalled $7 billion — mainly in oil, sugar, molasses, fats and vegetable oils and iron ore sectors. However, Mr. Viana says, Brazilians now want to diversify their exports to India.
“We have 260 Brazilian companies attending the event that Apex is organising in Delhi. We have representatives from all strategic sectors. We are taking a lot of people from the health area, including our Health Minister, because India is a major supplier of medicines to Brazil. We also have important companies of ethanol and biofuel onboard because there is already an agreement between Brazil and India in the area.” He added that there could be a major announcement about the arrival of Embraer, the Brazilian aircraft manufacturing firm, in India.
With energy security and sustainability reshaping global alignments — and threatening to rupture the existing world order amid intensifying geopolitical rivalries — the Brazilian side is keen to deepen engagement with India in these areas. “We have to work together for the energy transition, without forgetting that we still have a large trade in oil. We cannot, from one hour to the next, abandon oil, but we do have to work so that the world is more sustainable. And sustainable not only from the economic and energy point of view, but also from political point of view,” says Mr. Amorim, who has been one of the most influential Brazilian voices in international affairs for two decades.
While trade may dominate Lula’s agenda in Delhi, Brazil is also looking at India’s presidency of BRICS in 2026 to further advance the conversation on global governance and multilateralism which is under threat. For Mr. Amorim, the grouping must debate on reforming the global order to reflect the interests of the Global South.
“It is important that the Indian presidency of BRICS leads this discussion about the current world order and how to change it. We all know the struggle there is for the expansion of the UN Security Council. A world without rules is a very difficult world. India and Brazil have always worked with rules — the rules that they helped to build and that benefited us. And this is only possible within a balanced multilateral system, which BRICS has to help strengthen and rebuild,” said the adviser to Lula.
With U.S. President Donald Trump throwing out the rulebook on international trade, emerging economies have begun to explore more trade with other countries and blocs. Just a few weeks before India signed a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the EU, the South American trade bloc Mercosur, which Brazil is part of, also finalised its pact with the Europeans. Now, the long-pending Mercosur-India FTA may also come up for serious discussion during Lula’s visit.
“The tension of the U.S. with the whole world has generated opportunities for countries like Brazil, which have no disputes with anyone. The Mercosur–EU agreement is moving forward well. Though it is a multilateral agreement and involves many tariffs, we will discuss it with the Indian side,” said Mr. Viana, who is a member of Lula’s Workers Party and a close confidant of the President.
Brazil is yet to agree on a trade deal with the U.S. But, with the largest-ever business delegation to India in his third term as president, the Brazilian leader is looking at striking big deals with a fellow BRICS member before returning home after the Carnival is over.
Published – February 11, 2026 04:21 pm IST
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With eyes on trade deals and reform in global governance, Lula heads to India with 260 firms
