Iran Press/ Middle East: The BRICS group consists of five major emerging economies, namely Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Since the formation of BRICS more than a decade ago, member countries have achieved beneficial results in areas such as economy, trade, politics, security, technological innovations, as well as cultural and people-to-people exchanges.
The member countries of the BRICS group have more than 40% of the world's population and nearly a quarter of the world's gross domestic product.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is an international intergovernmental organization established in June 2001 in the Chinese city of Shanghai by Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
According to Iran Perss citing Sputnik news agency, Kanaan Yaghi, the Syrian Finance Minister, said on Thursday: "This country is trying to join the BRICS group and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and that the country is willing to submit its membership request to both bodies ."
Yaghi said: "Today, the Algerian president also wanted to speed up the process of his country's joining the BRICS in a bid to abandon the dollar and the euro which will have very wide benefits for the Algerian economy."
Earlier, Georgy Borisenko, the Russian ambassador to Cairo, also announced that Egypt has also applied to join the BRICS group.
Borisenko added: "Egypt applied to join the BRICS group, because one of the initiatives in which BRICS is currently participating is to facilitate trade as much as possible with alternative currencies (dollars), whether it is the national currency."
Nearly 20 Countries Want to Join BRICS
Nearly 20 countries are seeking to get BRICS membership and their number continues to grow, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said.
"The list of candidates for joining the association continues to increase. The number of states seeking to join this association is nearing twenty. It reflects BRICS’ growing and already considerable role in the international arena as an association of countries with similar positions. I would like to stress it," he told TASS on Thursday.
BRICS is a grouping of countries that do not follow the leader-follower principle, Ryabkov said. Instead, the partners "set a constructive agenda based on consensus," he said.
"Discussions continue on what could be the criteria for joining BRICS, and South Africa has intensified this work," the senior Russian diplomat said.
"I can say that, in our view, the Arab world and the Asia-Pacific region have been clearly `begging’ to join BRICS, as they have no representation there today. But we will see exactly what we can offer to the leaders regarding this, and leave this to the leaders to decide at the summit in Johannesburg," he concluded.
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