Learn more about how the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is on track to become the most harmful trade pact ever for access to medicines in developing countries.
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Will The Fight for Gay Rights Stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership?
By TJ Acena, PQ Monthly May 12, 2014
You may have heard that wealthy Hollywood types are boycotting the Beverly Hills Hotel (assuming you follow news about places only rich Hollywood types can afford to stay). This is because the hotel is owned by an investment firm that is owned by the Sultan of Brunei. The Sultan is implementing Sharia law in the tiny kingdom, which would make it legal to stone adulterers and LGBTQ people to death and place harsh sentences on women who have abortions or become pregnant outside of marriage.
This on its own is upsetting enough, but I came across an article on the Huffington Post that pointed out that Brunei would be part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and this recent controversy could threaten the TPP.
What is the TransPacific Partnership? Well it is similar to the North American Free Trade Agreement and establishes a free trade zone around the Pacific Ocean, encompassing (currently) fourteen countries, 800 million people, and 40 percent of the global economy. President Obama has been trying hard to get this passed but it has come up against some opposition for some very good reasons:
- From Médecins Sans Frontières: The TPP would establish strong intellectual property regimes that would extend patent monopolies on medications, delaying the production of generic drugs, including HIV medication. This would especially hurt people in developing countries at the expense of pharmaceutical companies, who have worked with the US government to help create the TPP.
- From The Nation: Text from the Stop Online Piracy Act appears in the TPP. You might remember that Internet activist Aaron Swartz lead the public campaign to stop SOPA.
- From Democracy Now!: The TPP is creates trade agreements similar to NAFTA, which hasn’t had the most amazing effects on the economies or the environments of the US or Mexico. According to Public Citizen Oregon lost over 18,000 manufacturing jobs (10%) during the NAFTA and WTO period (1994 – 2013)
- From Democracy Now!: It would make it easier for corporations to sue countries for lost profits. To use a recent example: In El Salvador the government shut down a Canadian mining firm after it dumped poisonous chemicals into the drinking water. Under the trade agreement the company sued the country for $315 million. Hypothetically this could also allow Brunei to sue the United States for lost profits over the boycott of the Beverly Hill Hotel.
So we have a trade deal which could keep developing countries from getting HIV medication, curtail internet freedom, affects the global economy in ways we can’t imagine yet, give immense power to corporations, and we would enter into this agreement with a country (exercising its religious freedom) that thinks (even if the standards of proof are high) that it is OK to stone LGBTQ people to death or put women in prison for getting an abortion.
Now I hope that all this attention does change the mind of the Sultan of Brunei and stops the TPP.
Entering Trans-Pacific Partnership would boost exports by $15.7 billion: report
2013-09-11 http://www.canplastics.com
Canadian exports could grow by as much as $15.7-billion if the federal government pulls the trigger on entering into the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), according to the Fraser Institute.
According to a new study from the public policy think-tank, joining the TPP would provide a huge boost to the national economy and help move Canada away from its dependence on the United States as a trading partner.
“With the Conservative government signalling that international trade is a top priority, the TPP offers a chance for Canada to gain a foothold in the prosperous and growing Asian markets and move the country away from trade dependence on the United States,” international trade specialist and study co-author Laura Dawson said in a statement. “Participating in the TPP is also important to safeguard Canada’s current trade agreements, particularly (the North American Free Trade Agreement) NAFTA.”
While Dawson calculates that the TPP could provide a $9.9-billion increase in Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP), she said the agreement could be equally as important in shaping the rules of future trade agreements and ensuring gains already made, such as NAFTA, are protected so Canada does not have to undertake costly reforms to adapt to a new system.
“The era of easy trade policy gains may be over but the disciplines imposed by the TPP on investment, regulatory alignment, rules of origin and market access will, in the longer term, help increase certainty, reduce risk, and lower costs for Canadian exporters and investors in emerging markets,” Dawson said.
Entering the TPP trade agreement would secure a trade alliance between Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore the U.S. and Vietnam, representing a combined economy of more than $27-trillion and about one third of global trade.
Additionally, the TPP has the potential to expand to include all Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) countries, providing for greater market-access gains in the future, the study.
“A significant attraction of the TPP is engaging China,” Dawson continued. “If China were to join, the TPP would become the first regional agreement to include the world’s three largest economies: the United States, China and Japan.”
The study also notes that when Canada negotiated the NAFTA and World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements in the early 1990s, issues such as electronic commerce, digital media and third-party logistics had not yet entered the commercial mainstream.
The TPP agreement provides a platform for discussing and resolving these and other emerging issues.
“If Ottawa is serious about diversifying Canada’s trade relationships, then TPP membership is a golden opportunity to do so,” Dawson said.
The full report can be accessed here.
New warnings on TPP, free trade ‘regime’ fostering ‘global emergency situation’
– Andrea Germanos, staff writer http://www.commondreams.org
September 10, 2013
As secretive talks over the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP)—the pending free trade agreement slammed as “NAFTA on steroids” and “a quiet coup for the investor class“—continue, new warnings highlight the corporate winners and global losers at stake.
(Photo: GlobalTradeWatch/cc/flickr)
As Kristen Beifus, director of the Washington Fair Trade Coalition, wrote,
The corporate powers granted in the TPP can override domestic laws on environmental health and safety, and labor and citizens’ rights. Not only that, but multinationals can claim that those domestic laws hamper free trade and sue member countries for millions of dollars. The TPP is in many ways an attempt to revive the stalled expansion of the World Trade Organization.
In other words, as Food & Water Watch’s Mitch Jones explained, TPP would be a “permanent power grab by corporations” that “would permanently enshrine the very economic system that has lead to greater imbalances in income and wealth and increasing economic crises.”
Save the climate, ditch ‘free trade’
Charging that “To confront the climate emergency we need to dismantle the WTO and the free trade regime,” groups including La Via Campesina, Focus on the Global South and Oilwatch International explain that the logic of free trade policies, including the TPP,
promotes the construction of market-oriented and imbalanced economies that focus on the demands of the market rather than the needs of their people on the ground. These export-oriented economies also bleed Mother Nature in order to exploit the most out of it provoking disruptions in the environment as we are seeing now with climate change, biodiversity loss and the destruction of ecosystems. This is the capitalist logic – nature is just a thing to be exploited for profit.
The real beneficiaries of this [sic] imbalanced trade rules of the WTO are the transnational corporations since in reality, they are the ones that have more “comparative advantages” than fledgling national and domestic infant industries. In a world of free trade flows – as the WTO aspires – transnational corporations are free to enter and move between countries, choosing those with cheap labor and relaxed regulations and at the same time able to exit and move out just as easily after it has exhausted and grabbed the natural resources, leaving in several cases, their toxic waste.
At the same time, the losers are many – the farmers who lose their farms as they cannot compete with cheap food imports that flood the local markets, the workers whose jobs are made even more unstable and precarious with the pressure to lower labor standards, the persons who are forced to migrate because of loss of livelihood, the women who are most times those who bear the brunt of economic distress on the family and community, the indigenous people who are displaced from their lands, and Mother Earth.
And as Common Dreams contributor and organic dairy farmer Jim Goodman points out, with TPP,
Policies promoting sustainably produced foods sourced from local small-scale farmers for consumption in schools or institutions, could be deemed to unfairly discriminate against foreign suppliers.
Trade liberalization and elimination of local control will promote more intensive fossil fuel based agricultural production that is the exact opposite of the type of farming we must promote to reverse agriculture’s contribution to climate change.
Uprisings against such trade agreements and their effects are taking place now, as small-scale farmers in Colombia, joined by gorwing numbers of civil society, have launched a series of protests against the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement that has devastated local agriculture.
More losers: public health, and probably you
Among the losers of the TPP, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), are most U.S. workers. In a report released Tuesday, CEPR economist David Rosnick looks at projections for the effect of trade on inequality and finds that
in fact, most workers are likely to lose — the exceptions being some of the bottom quarter or so whose earnings are determined by the minimum wage; and those with the highest wages who are more protected from international competition. Rather, many top incomes will rise as a result of TPP expansion of the terms and enforcement of copyrights and patents.
Another potential loser: public health, thanks to a potential cave to Big Tobacco.
(Photo: Caelie_Frampton/cc/flickr)As Vietnam’s Thanh Nien Daily reports,
The US government has sought to include tobacco in a regional free-trade pact, which would enable tobacco companies to use trade rules to compromise government anti-smoking regulations.
In talks that began August 23 in Brunei for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), if the US proposal is accepted, Big Tobacco could sue countries that enact anti-smoking laws deemed to be in breach of the TPP, health groups say.
Watchdog group Public Citizen notes that “The Obama administration has drawn sharp criticism from leading health organizations, U.S. state representatives, and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg” for this cave to Big Tobacco. Public Citizen continues:
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.
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“We are living a global emergency situation,” the environmental justice groups write, and the solution will come from nothing short of a paradigm shift away from free trade policies that threaten the climate, food sovereignty and the global “99%.”
“If we are to save nature and humanity, we need to change the system and changing the system means dismantling the free trade regime.”
Push To Have New Zealand Cut Lose From Trans- Pacific Partnership Agreement
Groser and Key must reject ongoing US assault on Pharmac in the TPPA
Posted on September 11, 2013 by Admin2 http://www.nznotforsale.org/
‘There are further reports that the US informally proposed a two-tier approach to pharmaceuticals during the recent Brunei round’, said Professor Jane Kelsey, referring to an article in Inside US Trade published yesterday.
The US continues to target the availability of generic medicines on which the Pharmac system relies.
The revised US proposal would give Malaysia, Vietnam, Peru and Brunei more flexibility on the grounds they are non–OECD countries – even though Brunei’s per capita GDP is over US$50,000 and New Zealand’s is US$28,800.
Those countries would still have to accept stricter intellectual property rules than they have now and may eventually have to accept the extreme version the US wants to impose on the TPPA countries that are part of the OECD.
‘This two-tier approach does not mean they suddenly have a conscience about the impact of the TPPA on access to affordable medicines in poorer countries of the TPP’, said Professor Kelsey.
‘The US is clearly using the TPPA to establish a “gold standard” for its drug companies across the OECD’, according to Professor Kelsey. ‘They don’t give a damn about what that means for access to affordable medicines and the sustainability of our public health system or that of any other country.’
New Zealand, along with Australia, Chile, Canada, Malaysia and Singapore have reportedly made a much more conservative counter-proposal.
This counter-proposal is likely to be discussed at the forthcoming ‘intersessional’ meeting on intellectual property in Mexico from 23 September to 2 October and probably at the meeting of chief negotiators immediately before that in Washington.
‘The US may tactically hold back the discussion of its own proposal until after that meeting. They can then elevate it directly to the level of ministers and leaders when they meet in Bali during APEC in early October and in Brunei immediately after that for ASEAN’, Professor Kelsey observed. ‘Ominously, the US is expected to chair those meetings.’
‘Trade Minister Groser and Prime Minister Key must stand firm behind the New Zealand negotiators. They cannot give way to US demands and still claim to have defended Pharmac’s “fundamentals’’.’
TPPA goes into overdrive and underground
Moves to get the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) to the point of sign-off by the end of the year went into overdrive at the round just ended in Brunei, according to Professor Jane Kelsey who was present as a ‘stakeholder’ for the final few days.
Only the most problematic chapters met in Brunei. They included intellectual property (which discussed patents on medicines), state-owned enterprises, environment, investment and market access for goods, including agriculture.
Most other chapters are ‘closed’. That means the technical work is complete and ready for political deals on the controversial matters that remain unresolved.
‘Some countries report that little progress was made in Brunei. But that should not lull anyone into complacency’, Professor Kelsey warned.
‘While many negotiators were exhausted and some were incredulous about concluding their chapter by the end of the year, the politicians seem determined.’
‘To have any chance of pulling off an outcome, groups negotiating some chapters will have to meet every month between now and December.’
Detective work indicates that informal ‘inter-sessional’ meetings on six chapters* are scheduled within the next four weeks – all in North America.
‘“Inter-sessional” is a misnomer’, says Professor Kelsey, ‘because they are not planning any more formal sessions. There will be no access for the media or stakeholders to these smaller meetings.’
‘Past inter-sessionals have been shrouded in secrecy to ensure we can’t find out what’s happening and we don’t have access to those negotiators who see value in talking with us.’
‘The last three years of the TPPA have been widely condemned for their lack of transparency. The process is now going further underground’.
The chief negotiators will apparently meet in Washington DC from 22-24 September, with the US in the chair. They will report to their trade ministers who meet on the margins of APEC in Bali in early October.
The ministers are expected to begin the political horse-trading then. They will report, in turn, to their leaders who are in Bali on 6-7 October for APEC and immediately after that in Brunei for the ASEAN summit. Obama will apparently chair their meetings.
‘It remains to be seen what they can settle by December. The US is expected to table a new text on patents for medicines. There are rumours that this aims to divide and rule its opponents and could leave New Zealand out in the cold.’
‘But the biggest obstacle to a deal is the US-driven chapter on state-owned enterprises, where discussions on the text have barely begun. A new version that combines US and Australian proposals is beset with political, conceptual and technical problems. Almost no progress was made on it in Brunei.’
‘Finishing in December may mean the Obama administration has to give this chapter away’, Professor Kelsey speculated. ‘Yet the SOE chapter has been a centrepiece of their sales pitch to Congress on the TPPA. Without it, Congress may refuse to give the President “fast track” authority and retain their power to pick apart any final deal.’
‘There are still many twists and turns to go in these negotiations. The problem is that we will have even less chance to know what they are and what political deals are being made to eliminate them.’
* These appear to be labour (especially on enforcement) in Ottawa; intellectual property (including patents for medicines) Mexico City; e-commerce (including privacy and data protection) San Francisco; investment (mainly schedules of exclusions), location unknown; technical barriers to trade (labelling and technical standards) Mexico City; legal issues (including medical pricing and tobacco) Washington DC.
Andrew Phillip Chernoff 