Source: Summary of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement | United States Trade Representative
Tag Archives: brunei darussalam
TPP talks on tariffs advance as Brunei round ends
Kyodo News International August 30, 2013
Japan and 11 other Pacific Rim countries wrapped up the 19th round of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade negotiations in Brunei on Friday, saying they have advanced work on tariffs and other key subjects while agreeing to hold more working-level negotiations in coming weeks.
During the nine-day round since Aug. 22, Japan proposed eliminating tariffs on around 80 percent of imported products, and plans to raise the offer to over 90 percent in subsequent negotiations, sources said.
The 12 participating countries, including the United States, are now arranging a meeting of chief negotiators in Washington Sept. 18-21 as they pursue the goal of concluding a deal by a year-end deadline, according to Japanese officials.
The Brunei round was the last round of full-scale negotiations, with the countries now expected to focus on intersessional meetings involving only one or two working groups from now on, one source said.
In a statement released at the end of the Brunei round, the TPP countries said, “Negotiators advanced their technical work this round on the texts covering market access,” which deals with tariff cuts, and numerous other fields such as fishing subsidies and intellectual property.
Market access is one of the issues that Japan is keen to discuss as it faces strong domestic pressure to protect rice and four other sensitive farm products by retaining tariffs it levies on imports of those items.
Japan’s chief negotiator Koji Tsuruoka said at a press conference that the nation has held bilateral tariff negotiations with all TPP countries other than Chile and Peru this time.
Japan exchanged lists of proposals on tariff-free items with six countries — Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, New Zealand, Mexico and Peru, a source familiar with the matter said.
The negotiations with the United States and Australia did not involve an exchange of a list of proposal on tariff-free items as the United States has said it can only table its offer in September while Australia awaits a general election on Sept. 7.
Tsuruoka indicated a plan to raise the ratio of tariff-free items, saying Japan’s counterparts who received its tariff proposals have said there is still much room for improvement.
Under the 13 existing free trade agreements concluded by Japan, the percentage of items on which Tokyo agreed to eliminate tariffs within 10 years ranges from 84.4 percent to 88.4 percent of the total.
If Japan agrees to abolish all tariffs other than those on its five key farm product categories — rice, wheat, beef and pork (counted as one), dairy products and sugar — the tariff-free percentage would rise to 93.5 percent.
The latest TPP statement also said, “Negotiators will meet again intersessionally in the coming weeks to further their work” toward the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum summit scheduled to be held in Bali, Indonesia, in early October.
The TPP countries have been aiming to reach a basic agreement in October and conclude a deal by the end of the year. Ministers of the 12 TPP members reaffirmed the target after meeting in the first two days of the Brunei round last week.
The countries involved in the TPP negotiations are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam.
Japan only joined the TPP talks near the end of the Malaysia round held in July, and the latest Brunei round was the first full round it participated in.
The TPP negotiations stretch over 21 fields as the members are aiming for creation of a comprehensive free trade pact covering nearly 40 percent of global economic output and about a third of world trade. The latest round dealt with 10 of the fields.
While most of the working groups finished negotiations for this round, some are expected to continue their work through Saturday.
TPP sources have said some groups were not as successful as desired, including the one on the environment, which made less than 40 percent of the progress expected.
==Kyodo
Concerns Raised That TPP Negotiations Ensure Rights Of Countries Not Impinged On
By Andrew Chernoff August 29, 2013 
Some people in the host country of the 19th Round of Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) Negotiations in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei are concerned about tobacco and the push by the United States and its’ tobacco multinational companies to water down nations’ rights to enact legislation or rules that discourage the use of tobacco products in the TPP participating countries.
In the August 29, 2013 edition of the Brunei Times newspaper, a letter to the editor raised a further concern that perhaps, it was not just tobacco that countries were being influenced to change their legislation or rules about.
The letter titled, “Solid stance or wishful thinking on TPP?”, the writer says:
“IN A Canadian paper dated August 27, 2013, it was stated that “The Americans, apparently at the behest of tobacco companies, are trying to water down nations’ rights to enact legislation or rules that discourage the use of tobacco products”.
Are tobacco companies the only ones doing this?
The letter from MoFAT published in your paper on the same date stated that “On the queries on whether the TPP will impinge upon Brunei Darussalam’s sovereignty, our accession to the TPP will not prevent us from continuing to apply our laws and regulations”.
“Watering down” national rights to enact certain kinds of legislation or rules would certainly lead to impingement of a country’s sovereignty.”
This concern is not just one the citizens of Brunei should be concerned about. Canadians should have the same concern, and with the secrecy that abounds with negotiations, and the fact that the Canadian government is determined to make the decision on the final look of the partnership agreement, all Canadians must make sure that our politicians inform us of the particulars of the agreement items and get feedback from the Canadian electorate before Parliament gives royal assent.
As one commenter to the article in the Brunei Times said, and I quote, “The public at large (society) needs to participate in this debate so governments can formulate better strategies to balance economic diversification efforts and protection of the public.”
I wholeheartedly agree. How about you?
Bloomberg, Health Experts Denounce Obama’s Gift to Big Tobacco in the TPP
The Obama administration has drawn sharp criticism from leading health organizations, U.S. state representatives, and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg by caving to pressure from Big Tobacco to abandon safeguards for tobacco control policies in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the pending “free trade” deal with 11 Pacific Rim countries. The administration has scrapped a proposal to provide a “safe harbor” for tobacco control measures.
Instead the administration will issue a proposal in the current Brunei round of TPP negotiations that clears a path for tobacco corporations to use the TPP to directly challenge governments’ progressive public health measures.
In response to the announcement, a major victory in tobacco corporations’ effort to use TPP-like deals to roll back anti-smoking safeguards, Dr. Gregory Connolly of the Harvard School of Public Health stated, “Our government’s trade policy is promoting the tobacco epidemic.”
The American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, and the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids denounced the Obama administration’s decision to cave to Big Tobacco’s TPP demands at the expense of public health. Legal and health experts at the Harvard School of Public Health, Georgetown University Law Center, and Action on Smoking and Health blasted the TPP proposal, finding it “will do little to protect governments’ right to regulate tobacco.” The state of Maine’s Citizen Trade Policy Commission concluded, “it would be better to not offer this text at all than to give the false impression that the United States is serious about protecting government authority within the TPP to regulate tobacco to protect health.”
Articles spotlighting the administration’s TPP backtracking have appeared in many prominent news sources, including the Washington Post, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and Reuters.
New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg also weighed in on the TPP controversy by releasing a scathing op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times. Bloomberg noted that not only would the U.S. proposal restrict tobacco control measures and significantly decrease the price of cigarettes, but also expose TPP governments to direct “investor-state” challenges launched by tobacco corporations against public health laws:
If the Obama administration’s policy reversal is allowed to stand, not only will cigarettes be cheaper for the 800 million people in the countries affected by the trade pact, but multinational tobacco corporations will be able to challenge those governments — including America’s — for implementing lifesaving public health policies. This would not only put our tobacco-control regulations in peril, but also create a chilling effect that would prevent further action, which is desperately needed.
He’s right. The TPP’s extreme investor privileges would empower tobacco corporations to skirt domestic legal systems and attack tobacco control policies before extrajudicial tribunals as a means of intimidating policymakers who would dare to enact such safeguards. The Obama administration’s proposal does nothing to limit, or even to address, this empowerment of Big Tobacco.
Unfortunately, the investor-state threat is not a hypothetical one. Phillip Morris has already used such investor privileges in other treaties to attack landmark anti-smoking laws in Australia and Uruguay after failing to undermine those health laws in domestic courts. As Andrew Martin points out in Bloomberg, Philip Morris has been leading Big Tobacco’s battle to pressure the Obama administration to weaken tobacco-control safeguards in the TPP.
The Obama administration’s caving to that pressure makes clear the TPP’s very real threat to public health. As Laurent Huber of Action on Smoking and Health stated, the new tobacco-friendly proposal for TPP “will mean more lives lost, both here in the US and abroad.” It is more crucial than ever to expose the TPP and to stop it from being fast tracked through Congress. Our health depends on it.
Japanese farmers’ opposition to TPP waning, Malaysian minister says
Kyodo News International August 29, 2013
Japan’s minister in charge of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, Akira Amari, has said opposition toward the TPP from his country’s powerful agriculture lobby is dying down, albeit slowly, according to Malaysia’s International Trade and Industry Minister Mustapa Mohamad.
Speaking to reporters this week, Mustapa said Amari made the remark to him on the sidelines of the recently concluded TPP ministerial meeting in Brunei last week.
Later, Amari said he had not made a direct remark on farmers’ concerns to Mustapa, but he indicated that someone in his delegation may have made the comment.
Mustapa, however, told Kyodo News, “The Japanese shared with us some issues they have in agriculture, but they told me that opposition is slowly dying down. It wasn’t as serious as it was six months ago. In their view, it’s manageable.”
The agriculture lobby in Japan has been at the forefront in opposing the Trans-Pacific free trade deal, urging the government to protect sensitive farm products like rice, wheat, beef, pork, dairy products and sugar.
Japan, which first participated in the TPP negotiations only at the tail end of the 18th round in Malaysia, is now in full gear at the 19th round in Brunei that runs through Friday.
Mustapa described the Japanese delegation as “very gung ho.”
“Japan is one of those countries that’s very committed. Although they’ve just come on board, they’re very aggressive,” he said.
The Malaysian government is also facing growing opposition toward the TPP.
Leading the dissent is former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who on Monday urged the government to pull out from the talks.
He slammed the free trade pact as a U.S. tool to colonize smaller countries such as Malaysia.
But one of his concerns is that the pact would strip away the government’s affirmative action policy of giving special treatment to ethnic Malays, who account for more than 60 percent of the country’s 29 million population but still lag behind the minority ethnic Chinese in the economic sector.
Mustapa said the government will conduct two cost-benefit analyses on the TPP — one on the impact on small and medium-sized enterprises and the interests of ethnic Malays, and the other on the overall national interest.
The studies, once they begin, are expected to take about two to three months to complete.
Mustapa said the studies will not delay the negotiations that are targeted to be wrapped up by year-end.
“Negotiation is still in progress. There’s no finality to it yet,” he said.
He added, “There are many issues that are still outstanding and we’re not going to be bound by any timeline.”
He reiterated that “if the agreement doesn’t serve the national interest, we will not sign.”
The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement involves Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam, which together account for about a third of global economic output.
Andrew Phillip Chernoff 