They are very different countries with very varying interests. However, there is one outstanding issue where the BRICS could bring their joint clout together to make a difference. The issue concerns who should take over from Dr Robert Zoellick as the next president of the World Bank in mid-year. For once there is a contest, with three candidates, two of them nominated by BRICS countries.
President Barack Obama made the surprise nomination of Dr Jim Yong Kim, president of Ivy League Dartmouth College, with all the assurance that it is the US president's job to name the bank president.
The US treasury announced this week that candidate Kim, a medical doctor with a PhD in anthropology, who was born in South Korea and migrated to the US at the age of five, will set off on a world tour, going to China, India, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Mexico and Ethiopia on a 'listening tour' to talk about the World Bank and its priorities. The treasury did not say who was paying for the trip.
It remains to be seen whether the other candidates, Columbia University professor and former finance minister of Colombia Jose Antonio Ocampo, nominated by Brazil, and Nigerian finance minister and former World Bank official Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, nominated by South Africa, have the wherewithal or luxury of time off from their day jobs to make similar tours.
Washington has hitherto chosen the World Bank president under a cosy deal agreed back in the mid-1940s when the Allied powers set up the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to restore peace and prosperity to a world shattered by war and destruction.
But the development committee, the key committee of the 187 governments that are the shareholders of the World Bank, promised in successive meetings that the next president should be chosen by merit-based open, fair and transparent competition.