Rally outside the TPP talks in Sydney, Oct. 25, 2014. Credit: SumOfUs/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Nov 11 2014 (IPS)

For the third year in a row, government negotiators for 12 Pacific Rim countries have missed an internal deadline to reach agreement on a controversial U.S.-led trade deal.

And though negotiators for the accord, known as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), say the process is nearing completion, critics of the deal are expressing optimism that both public opinion and political timing are increasingly against the deal.“TPP proponents know they’re under the clock. The resistance against the TPP is as strong as it’s ever been, and is only growing stronger.” -- Arthur Stamoulis of the Citizens Trade Campaign

“The reason the Obama administration keeps missing deadline after deadline, year after year, is that it’s pushing an extremely unpopular agenda that benefits a handful of big corporations at the expense of the economy, environment and public health in each TPP country and beyond,” Arthur Stamoulis, executive director of the Citizens Trade Campaign, an advocacy group that opposes the TPP, told IPS.

“People and parliaments across the Pacific Rim are starting to realise that the TPP would be bad news for their countries. That includes here in the U.S.”

TPP negotiators confirmed the news on Monday at a regional summit in Beijing. President Barack Obama’s administration, which has been spearheading the TPP talks, had set the meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) grouping as a key target for agreement.

President Obama has made the TPP a central part of his attempt to reorient the United States towards Asia – and to economically circumscribe China, which isn’t party to the talks. On Monday, the president himself was in Beijing, where he acknowledged that the TPP process now needed additional political pressure.

“During the past few weeks, our teams have made good progress in resolving several outstanding issues regarding a potential agreement. Today is an opportunity at the political level for us to break some remaining logjams,” the president told trade ministers in Beijing.

“To ensure that TPP is a success, we also have to make sure that all of our people back home understand the benefits for them – that it means more trade, more good jobs, and higher incomes for people throughout the region, including the United States.”

The president said the TPP talks have the possibility of resulting in a “historic achievement”. A statement released by the 12 countries party to the talks suggested that “the end” of the negotiations is “coming into focus”.

Yet disagreements remain, with media reports pointing to agricultural protectionism as proving to be particularly thorny. Others say that substantive frustration remains over a raft of disparate issues, many far from traditional trade concerns – including environmental impact, labour safeguards, medicinal pricing, patent rules and investors’ ability to circumvent national law, among other concerns.

In many ways, it is the broad scope of issues on which the TPP touches that is responsible for strengthening public concern. Now, with President Obama down to his final two years in office, critics are increasingly confident in their ability to stave off agreement.

With the U.S. 2016 president elections likely to heat up as early as the middle of next year, passage of any major trade agreement by U.S. lawmakers would be improbable until 2017 at the earliest.

“TPP proponents know they’re under the clock,” the Citizen Trade Campaign’s Stamoulis says. “The resistance against the TPP is as strong as it’s ever been, and is only growing stronger.”

Corporatist concerns

Last week’s national election here in the U.S. did change the discussion around one issue that would be key for any eventual TPP agreement: whether President Obama is allowed to negotiate unilaterally, or whether he would need Congress’s point-by-point approval of a proposed accord.

Because trade agreements typically touch on so many domestically sensitive issues, U.S. presidents in the past have asked for approval to negotiate without input from lawmakers. Such “fast track” authorities then allow Congress only a single up-or-down vote at the end of the process.

Yet due to concern among U.S. constituents over the potential impact of the TPP on the domestic economy, both houses of the U.S. Congress has been reluctant to approve President Obama’s requests for these authorities. Still, last week’s election some have suggested that this could change.

The issue could now come down to a debate that is taking place within the Republican Party, which increased its majority in the House of Representatives and in January will take over control of the Senate. Yet while the House has consistently opposed passage of fast track authorities for President Obama, the new Republican Senate leadership has suggested that such legislation could now be a key priority early next year.

“Most of [President Obama’s] party is unenthusiastic about international trade. We think it’s good for America,” Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate and the figure who will set the body’s agenda this coming year, said at a press conference following last week’s election.

“And the president and I discussed that … and I think he’s interested in moving forward. I said, ‘Send us trade agreements. We’re anxious to take a look at them.’”

The new potential movement on fast track authorities has sparked a furious debate among conservatives, particularly between those who have traditionally supported big business and those increasingly concerned about globalisation’s impact on U.S. workers. This division has strengthened since the 2008 economic downturn.

“It’s only in the past few years that we’ve seen a small cabal of internationalist, Big Business-allied Republicans emerge, and it is this corporatist wing that has pushed for free trade,” Curtis Ellis, a spokesperson with the American Jobs Alliance and executive director of ObamaTrade.com, a conservative watchdog site, told IPS.

“If we’re going to move all of our factories overseas, the American people are going to get stuck with the short end of stick. And really, even supporters of the TPP admit that it’s not about trade but rather about investment – about securing overarching global governance rules on investment.”

Indeed, of the TPP’s 29 proposed chapters, just five deal directly with trade, according to Public Citizen, a consumer interest group here.

“[T]he non-trade provisions would promote lower wages, higher medicine prices, more unsafe imported food, and new rights for foreign investors to demand payments from national treasuries over domestic laws they believe undermine the new TPP privileges they would gain,” Lori Wallach, the head of the group’s Global Trade Watch programme, said Monday.

“Despite the intense secrecy of the negotiations … many TPP nations have woken up to the fact that the deal now on offer would be damaging to most people, even if the large corporations pushing the deal might improve their profit margins.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be reached at cbiron@ips.org

LM Glasfiber workers hoist a wind turbine blade in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Credit: Tu/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jul 11 2014 (IPS)

Formal negotiations began this week around the increasingly significant global trade in “environmental goods”, those technologies seen as environmentally beneficial, including in combating climate change.

Attempts have been made to liberalise this market for years. But on Tuesday, 13 countries, constituting nearly 90 percent of the current trade in green goods such as solar panels, wind turbines and wastewater treatment filters, came together in Geneva to try again to reach agreement."There is no definition yet of what actually constitutes an ‘environmental good’, and many of the goods being considered are actually harmful to the environment.” -- Ilana Solomon

Yet there remains significant confusion around the actual potential – or even broader aim – of the talks, towards what’s being called the Environmental Goods Agreement. Green groups are expressing open scepticism of the process, taking place under the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

“From our perspective, we think increasing trade in and use of environmentally beneficial products is incredibly important. But we have really serious concerns about the approach the WTO is taking,” Ilana Solomon, the director of the Responsible Trade Program at the Sierra Club, a conservation and advocacy group, told IPS.

“This approach is about removing tariffs on a list of products that are supposedly beneficial to the environment. But there is no definition yet of what actually constitutes an ‘environmental good’, and many of the goods being considered are actually harmful to the environment.”

The WTO talks are taking place between the United States, the European Union, China, Australia, Japan and others. Representatives are starting from a list of 54 product categories, agreed upon in 2012 among the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) grouping.

The APEC countries are now working to reduce tariffs on these products to below five percent by 2015.

Yet the list includes many items that can be used in ways that could be either environmentally positive or negative. This includes, for instance, waste incinerators, centrifuges, gas turbines, sludge compactors and a variety of technical machinery.

The list would also seem to largely exclude poor countries. Currently, only Costa Rica has joined what are otherwise industrialised and middle-income economies in the talks.

“Poor countries are probably not producing these items,” Kim Elliott, a senior researcher on trade at the Center for Global Development, a think tank here, told IPS. “If they don’t participate in these talks they’ll likely lose out around high tariffs, but they’re probably not going to be doing much exporting.”

While proponents tend to characterise the negotiations in terms of lowering overall prices for green goods, little is said of the potential impact on nascent domestic industries.

“There might well be reasons a developing country would want to develop its own industry in, say, solar panels or wind turbines,” the Sierra Club’s Solomon says. “But having low or no tariffs could impede the ability of these countries to develop their own domestic renewable energy industries.”

Knock-on effects?

The World Trade Organisation does not include climate change in its purview. Yet since the mid-1990s the multilateral organisation says it has worked to establish “a clear link between sustainable development and disciplined trade liberalization – in order to ensure that market opening goes hand in hand with environmental and social objectives.”

Momentum behind the new talks is in part due to a push from President Barack Obama. Last year, as part of a major new focus on climate, the president announced that U.S. officials would engage in the negotiations in order “to help more countries skip past the dirty phase of development and join a global low-carbon economy.”

The administration’s interest in the issue will also be shared by other proponents of expanded free trade. Multilateral trade talks have seen little to no progress over the past two decades, after all, so proponents hope that linking these issues could give a fillip to the multilateral system.

“Everybody, at least on paper, wants to do something on climate change, so this is seen as an issue that might be able to move,” the Center for Global Development’s Elliott says. “The idea is regarded as something of a win-win, as useful for the trading system and also for the planet.”

Of course, the U.S. government’s interest is also around strengthening U.S. exports, and as political pressures have risen around the world around climate change, the trade in green goods has quickly become a major force. According to official estimates, this market’s value doubled between 2011 and 2007, and stood at around a trillion dollars last year.

The U.S. share has been growing by eight percent per year since 2009, amounting to some 106 billion dollars last year.

Certainly business interests, in the United States and industrialised countries around the world, are showing significant interest in the new talks. On Tuesday, nearly 50 major business groups and trade associations wrote to the WTO negotiators to “strongly endorse” their efforts.

The industry groups also expressed hope that an accord around environmental goods could act as a catalyst for broader liberalisation.

“An ambitious [agreement] will further increase global trade in environmental goods, lowering the cost of addressing environmental and climate challenges by removing tariffs that can be as high as 35 percent,” the groups stated.

“In addition to its intrinsic commercial importance and desirability, a well-designed [agreement] can act as a stepping stone to lowering tariffs and other trade barriers in other sectors and associated value chains.”

Backdoor liberalisation

The U.S. administration may share this view. The Sierra Club’s Solomon points to a recent letter from Michael Froman, the United States’ top trade official, requesting the U.S. International Trade Commission to research the potential impact of trade liberalisation around environmental goods.

“In the absence of a universally accepted definition of an ‘environmental good,’” Froman wrote, “I request that, for the purpose of its analysis, the Commission refer to the items contained in the list attached to this letter.”

That list, which extends to 34 pages, contains hundreds of items not currently on the APEC list. These range from natural products (honey, palm oil, urea, coconut fibres, bamboo) to the technical (pipes and casings “of a kind used in drilling for oil and gas”) to the seemingly random (vacuum cleaners, cameras).

“This appears to suggest that this exercise isn’t about protecting the environment but rather about expanding the current model of free trade – a backdoor attempt to achieve liberalisation on a broad range of goods,” Solomon says.

“As this process moves forward, we’ll need a full environmental impact assessment of everything on the list under consideration. And it can’t just be the end uses that are examined, but rather the whole lifecycle of a product’s impact that is taken into account.”

Patented drugs limit patients’ access to public health care. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Oct 8 2013 (IPS)

The Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), the negotiation of which is set to conclude this year, could drive research into new drugs and improve access to medicines. Except – it won’t.

“The current health system is reaching its limit,” Judit Rius, manager of Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders Access Campaign in the United States, told IPS. “It is failing patients with rare diseases, for example.”

“That’s why the TPP could be a tool for promoting health and improving innovation and access, instead of fostering failed, costly systems based on monopolistic patents,” she added.

The TPP free trade accord went into force between Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore in January 2006. Eight other countries are now negotiating their incorporation: Australia, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, the United States and Vietnam.
Of the 29 chapters under negotiation, the ones on intellectual property, investment and government procurement contain proposals, especially from the United States, to limit research and development of generic medicines, which are sold with the name of the active ingredient and can be produced once the patent for the original brand-name drug has expired.

Because they are less expensive, generic drugs are essential in the fight against disease, especially in poor developing countries.

The TPP talks have been shrouded in secrecy. But Rius said the aspects of the TPP that have been leaked to the press would hinder R&D in generic medicines, hurting the reduction of prices that has been achieved in recent years.

“Most affected by this would be patients, organisations that supply medicines, health and economy ministries, developing countries, and companies that produce generic medicines,” she said.

These laboratories are worried.

“The TPP could lead to the extension of patents and could hamper access to medicines,” José Luis Cárdenas, a lawyer who is an adviser to the board of Chile’s Industrial Association of Pharmaceutical Laboratories (ASILFA), told IPS.

“It is not realistic to think that developing countries are going to invest in R&D to produce new molecules,” given the investment capacity of multinational corporations, he said.

The 19th round of negotiations for the TPP took place in Brunei Aug. 23-30. Since then, the talks are no longer general but thematic. There are 21 working groups negotiating the 29 chapters, which include issues like agriculture, intellectual property, environment, services, telecommunications and investment.

Pharmaceutical patents give 20 years of protection, according to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) adopted in 1994 during the creation of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

But the WTO’s 2001 Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health reaffirmed the flexibility of TRIPS member states in circumventing patent rights for better access to essential medicines. Under this declaration, governments may issue compulsory licenses on patents for medicines, or take other steps to protect public health.

Compulsory licensing is when a government allows someone else to produce a patented product without consent from the patent owner.

Washington wants the TPP to extend the length of chemical drug patent monopolies by five years and of biologics – products that includes a number of lifesaving drugs used to treat conditions such as cancer, diabetes and hepatitis C – by 12 years.

It is also pushing for data exclusivity, which gives companies monopoly rights over drugs by restricting the use of clinical trial data by drug regulators when approving generic or bioequivalent versions of drugs. This would keep the laboratories that make generic drugs from putting their products on the market as soon as patents expire.

In addition, it is pushing for the controversial practice of “evergreening” – the name given to the industry practice of seeking new patents after making small modifications to existing drugs.

Other measures on the table are patents for diagnostic, therapeutic and clinical procedures and the creation of a supranational mechanism to settle disputes between states and corporations.

These initiatives “affect access to medicine by the most disadvantaged segments of Mexican society due to the implications for the quality, safety and effectiveness of pharmaceutical products,” Gustavo Alcaraz, of Mexico’s National Association of Drug Manufacturers (ANAFAM), told IPS.

Alcaraz forms part of the Cuarto de Junto, a group of business delegates allowed by the economy ministry to monitor the negotiations without taking notes, after they sign a confidentiality agreement.

The secrecy surrounding the talks has kept civil society, academia, or health consumers from expressing their viewpoints on what is being negotiated.

Médecins Sans Frontières has called on the participating governments not to sign any agreement that undermines public health.

In 2011, non-governmental organisations and academics urged United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to health Anand Grover to issue an urgent appeal to the governments involved in the TPP talks, on the grounds that the trade deal would severely impact the public health of the poor in developing nations.

In response, Grover sent a letter to the national authorities. But only Australia, Chile and New Zealand answered, defending the secrecy around the talks and voicing assurances that the right to health would be respected.

The effects of overzealous protection of intellectual property in health have been studied.

An article published in 2009 by the Health Affairs journal states that “Our study suggests that CAFTA (Central America Free Trade Agreement)’s intellectual property rules on data exclusivity and patents are responsible for the removal of several lower-cost generic drugs from the market in Guatemala and for the denial of entry to a number of others.”

And as a result of the U.S.-Jordan free trade treaty, “Medicine prices in Jordan have increased 20 percent since 2001,” according to a report published by Oxfam in 2007.

“Higher medicine prices are now threatening the financial sustainability of government public health programmes,” added the report.

The details of the agreement are on the table at the annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Forum Summit, taking place Oct. 7-8 in Bali.

After a TPP meeting on intellectual property in Mexico City Sept. 23-Oct. 2, the United States and Japan are now considering proposing that the extension of patent terms only apply to developed countries, allowing shorter periods in developing nations like Malaysia and Vietnam.