The Brazilian ambassador in Pretoria makes much of the 30 or so Brazilian companies operating in South Africa, and the handful of South African companies operating in Brazil, as evidence of a flourishing commercial relationship. Add to that President Cyril Ramaphosa’s state visit to Brazil in March and the meeting between Brazil’s foreign minister, Mauro Vieira and his South African counterpart, Ronald Lamola, a couple of weeks ago and one could be forgiven for thinking that the relationship could not be better. We are politically like-minded countries, at least for much of this century while Brazil’s Workers’ Party has been in power, and we have been talking enthusiastically about “South-South co-operation” since at least 2000, when I first went to live and work in Brazil. But beneath the diplomatic optimism lies a rather less impressive reality. Business Leadership South Africa (BLSA) CEO Busi Mavuso recently pointed out that the commercial relationship overwhelmingly favours Brazil.According to South African government figures, bilateral trade amounted to R32.5bn in 2025, but South Africa exported only R5.2bn worth of goods to Brazil while importing R27.3bn from it, leaving us with a trade deficit of more than R22bn. Mavuso has consequently warned that simply freeing up trade further could widen that deficit unless South African exporters gain substantially better access to the Brazilian market. Since the Trump administration imposed punitive tariffs on Brazilian goods earlier this year, Brazilian exporters have increasingly been looking for alternative markets and Africa has suddenly been spoken about with renewed enthusiasm. I am pleased that this has forced Brazil to look across the South Atlantic again, because for all the rhetoric about South-South trade remarkably little has actually come of it. The comparison with Brazil’s and South Africa’s other major trading relationships is sobering. South Africa’s total goods trade with Brazil was only R32.5bn in 2025. By contrast, South Africa traded about $22.7bn in goods with the US, and €46bn with the EU. South Africa ran a goods trade surplus of roughly $10bn with the US, while trade with the EU was considerably more balanced. Brazil’s figures are even more revealing. Its goods trade with the US amounted to $94.2bn in 2025, while trade with the EU reached €87.1bn. Brazil actually ran a goods trade deficit of about $14.4bn with the US, despite President Donald Trump’s complaints about Brazilian trade practices. Brazil enjoyed a far smaller surplus of about €1.6bn with the EU.The cold reality is therefore rather obvious: Brazil and South Africa are simply not that important to each other commercially, despite decades of rosy political rhetoric suggesting otherwise. After 26 years of telling one another what close friends we are, one might reasonably have expected the commercial relationship to amount to considerably more than this. It does not. The US and EU remain vastly more important markets for both countries. Brazil has not made matters particularly easy. Its import duties, notoriously complicated tax system and obligations within the Mercosur trade bloc present substantial obstacles to outsiders. During Ramaphosa’s state visit in March one of the South African businessmen accompanying him was notably vocal at the business forum about the difficulties Brazil’s tax system creates for foreign investors. Brazilians can, of course, point to South African obstacles of their own. BEE requirements are frequently misunderstood or criticised abroad, while home affairs’ often ridiculous visa bureaucracy hardly makes South Africa an easy place in which to do business. But whatever excuses one chooses the result remains the same: we buy vastly more from Brazil than Brazil buys from us. One reason is that Brazil takes export promotion seriously. ApexBrasil aggressively promotes Brazilian products and companies abroad, and in my experience does so considerably more effectively than South Africa promotes its exporters. Brazil has built an institutional machinery designed to sell Brazil to the world. South Africa has never quite matched it. There is also a softer problem that is harder to quantify. Bilateral trade does not grow only through presidential visits, chambers of commerce and export-promotion agencies. It also depends on individuals who understand both countries, have long-standing networks in each and are willing to spend years encouraging business, investment and goodwill between them. Diplomatic relationships are surprisingly dependent on institutional memory, personal networks and people willing to open doors without being paid to do so. Brazil has not always been particularly good at recognising, retaining or cultivating those people. In a relationship as commercially modest as this one, alienating experienced intermediaries and advocates is not merely discourteous; it is strategically foolish. Countries with only a limited commercial footprint cannot afford to be careless with the people who have helped sustain it. It is therefore time to acknowledge that for all the diplomatic attention lavished on the relationship, Brazil has so far delivered remarkably little commercially for South Africa. In 2025 we exported only R5.2bn worth of goods to an economy of more than 200-million people while buying R27.3bn from it. For a relationship that has been elevated to a “strategic partnership” and celebrated endlessly through Brics, the India, Brazil and South Africa Dialogue Forum and the language of the Global South, those are remarkably modest numbers. There have certainly been prominent South African investments in Brazil. Naspers/Prosus’s investment in iFood is probably the most visible example. But acquisitions and changes in corporate ownership are not the same thing as greenfield investment and do not automatically translate into additional factories, productive capacity or employment. They therefore need to be treated with some caution when offered as proof of the success of the bilateral economic relationship. And all of this has occurred under a Brazilian government that is ideologically predisposed towards Africa and the Global South. Brazil’s presidential election in October introduces another uncertainty. President Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro, son of — currently jailed — former president Jair Bolsonaro, are now in an increasingly competitive race, with several recent polls putting a hypothetical second round within or close to the margin of error. Flávio Bolsonaro is politically far more sympathetic to Donald Trump than Lula is, and a Bolsonaro government would almost certainly change the political character of Brazil’s foreign policy. Brazil is already increasingly isolated on the left as South America has swung sharply to the right. Argentina, Chile, Colombia and several other countries are now governed from the right or centre-right. Colombia’s new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, has announced a substantial reduction of Colombia’s diplomatic network, including the closure of its embassy in South Africa. The Pretoria embassy has represented Colombia not merely in South Africa but across a substantial part of Southern Africa. Whatever one thinks of the policy, its message is difficult to misunderstand: Africa will occupy a less prominent place in Colombia’s foreign policy. We can only speculate about what a Flávio Bolsonaro government would do with Brazil’s African relationships. But it is hardly unreasonable to ask whether a government more closely aligned with Washington and less invested in the traditional Workers’ Party language of South-South solidarity would devote the same political energy to Africa. If relations with Washington improve and the American market becomes substantially more attractive to Brazilian exporters again, the current enthusiasm for finding new African markets may prove temporary. That does not mean South Africa should turn its back on Brazil. There are genuine opportunities between two large, sophisticated economies on opposite sides of the South Atlantic, and it would be foolish not to pursue them. But perhaps it is finally time to strip the relationship of some of its sentimentality. Brazil should be treated as an important potential market, not as a special commercial relationship simply because our governments like one another, sit together in Brics and have spent a quarter of a century speaking warmly about the Global South. After 26 years the numbers should count for more than the speeches. South Africa should continue doing business with Brazil wherever it makes commercial sense. But we should stop fantasising about the relationship we imagined we had and start judging it by the relationship that actually exists.• Myburgh is an attorney practising in Johannesburg and São Paulo.Business Day