The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement has the potential to become the largest “free trade” deal in the world. Negotiations began in Melbourne in March 2010, involving Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and the US. The combined GDP of these countries was about US$20.7 trillion in 2011. Japan is now close to being accepted into the negotiations.
The negotiations are being held in complete secrecy. However, hundreds of corporate advisors have privileged access to the documents and the negotiators. Leaks have revealed some details of what they are planning. Not just trade reforms, but also reducing the ability of governments to regulate activities and granting more rights to corporations.
The 17th round of negotiations will take place in Lima, Peru, on May 15-24. The agreement is scheduled to be finalised in October this year, but many trade experts believe this may only happen in 2014. A fact sheet put together by the Citizens Trade campaign is reprinted below, detailing some of the planned changes in the agreement. Visit www.citizensTrade.org for more information.
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The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a huge new international trade pact being pushed by the US government at the behest of transnational corporations. If it continues on its current course, the TPP will serve two primary purposes:
1. Making it easier for corporations to shift jobs throughout the world to wherever labour is the most exploited and regulations are the weakest; and
2. Putting checks on democracy at home and abroad by constraining governments’ ability to regulate in the public interest.
The TPP is already being negotiated between the United States, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam ― but it is also specifically intended as a “docking agreement” that other Pacific Rim countries would join over time, with Japan, South Korea, China and others already expressing some interest.
Corporations already cheering the TPP include Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wal-Mart, NewsCorp, GE and Halliburton. The TPP has been questioned ― if not outright opposed ― by union, environmental, family farm, consumer, indigenous and other social justice groups on four continents.
Here, specifically, are examples of what corporations want with the Trans-Pacific Partnership:
• Cheaper labor costs. Many corporations are looking for ways cut labour costs and undercut worker power in the US, China and throughout the world. The TPP would grant corporations easier access to labour markets in countries such as Vietnam where workers are paid even less than Chinese sweatshop workers. Whether or not corporations decide to move their production to these lower-paid countries, the threat of moving there (or of being undercut by competitors who have already done so) can be used suppress employee compensation virtually anywhere in the world.
• New tools for dismantling environmental laws. A wide range of transnational corporations, including those in extractive industries, have pushed for investment provisions in the TPP that
would enable them to challenge virtually any new law, regulation or even court decision that adversely affects their expected profits as a “regulatory taking” through international tribunals that circumvent domestic judicial systems. Similar provisions under past trade pacts have already been used to weaken portions of the Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act in the US, as well as the environmental and consumer safety protections of developing countries throughout the world.
• Longer drug Patents. The leaked US proposal for an intellectual property chapter
within the TPP would have the effect of extending drug patents for big pharmaceutical companies, making it harder for countries to produce or procure low-cost generic medications for people with HIV, tuberculosis and other life-threatening diseases.
• Further financial deregulation. Wall Street banks, insurance companies and hedge funds want the financial services provisions of the Trans-Pacific Partnership to handcuff the steps governments can take to: protect against “too big to fail,” regulate trade in toxic assets, erect firewalls between different financial service firms and control the flow of short-term capital into and out of economies.
• Caps on food safety protections. So-called “life sciences” corporations that produce pesticides, food additives and genetically-modified organisms use trade pacts to erect barriers making it harder for countries to adopt and maintain strong food safety regulations based on the precautionary
principle.
• Concentration of global food supplies. Big agribusiness middlemen want the TPP to enable them to “buy low” and “sell high” throughout the Pacific Rim, a practice that increasingly concentrates global food supplies in their hands, undercutting family farmers and often leading to wild fluctuations in food prices for consumers.
• Greater access to government contracts. A range of corporations want the TPP’s public procurement provisions to prevent governments from instituting public purchasing preferences designed to keep taxpayer dollars circulating in local economies. They also want to prevent government contracts from being used to advance a variety of other environmental, social and human rights goals.
• Lower taxes. Corporations that have already offshored their production to countries throughout the Pacific Rim are also looking to avoid tariffs on merchandise they’ve been importing back to the United States.
For years, the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations have taken place behind closed doors. Since negotiations began in 2008, none of the negotiating documents have been officially released for public review (although some have been leaked).
In the United States, about 600 corporate lobbyists have been named as official advisors, granting them steady access to the negotiating texts, as well as the negotiators.
Most civic groups, journalists and those whose lives will be affected by the negotiators’ decisions have no right to see the texts until the negotiations have concluded ― at which point, it is more-or-less impossible to change them. An international “Release the Texts” campaign has, thus far, not been answered.
