For many months, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) debates between the European Commission (EC) and the U.S. government were a matter for insiders.

In July 2013, government officials and representatives of international corporations agreed behind closed doors that such a free trade agreement (FTA) would be a great step forward towards homogenising social, environmental, health, industrial, and labour standards across the Atlantic Ocean.

Until recently, only a handful of civil society organisations, mostly based in Brussels, questioned the wisdom of such an agreement, and revealed the secret dealings of governments, in particular those referring to the so-called ‘investor protection clauses’ and the downgrading of social and environmental standards in Europe, to the detriment of European consumers and parliaments.

But, under pressure from civil society groups, the EC agreed earlier this year to launch a process of public consultation on the TTIP. And, since early May, after demonstrations by numerous consumer, environmental protection and labour groups, the TTIP has become a theme debated across society, and criticism of the way the EC and the U.S. government, in close cooperation with corporate lobbyist groups, have managed the secret negotiations is now general.Criticism of the way the EC and the U.S. government, in close cooperation with corporate lobbyist groups, have managed the secret negotiations is now general

By early May, some 500,000 people in Germany alone had signed a petition against the TTIP, complaining that the agreement would “undermine democracy and the rule of law… endanger our health… and (would be) practically irreversible.”

Even sectors of governments have become outspoken critics of the TTIP. During a conference on the TTIP held in Berlin on May 20, the German Minister of State for Culture and Media, Monika Gruetters, said: “We Europeans have plenty to lose,”  if the FTA with the United States were to forbid state subsidies for theatre, music, public radio, and cinema production.

Gruetters even used a slogan typical of anti-globalisation activists, by saying that “culture is not a commodity.” That’s why, Gruetters explained, European states subsidise cultural production, “to permit arts to be critical, complex, (and) heterogeneous.”

However, she said, for the U.S. government such subsidies are “protectionist measures.” To confirm this view, Gruetters quoted a “recent conversation” she had with the U.S. ambassador to Berlin, John B. Emerson.

“State privileges for cultural production belong to the European self-conception,” Gruetters insisted. “We oppose a new deregulation of culture (as demanded by the TTIP) because we are afraid we would lose our unique cultural landscape.”

German Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy, Sigmar Gabriel, has also adopted the critical position of civil society groups against the investor protection clause that makes up the bulk of the TTIP. According to this clause, transnational corporations would be allowed to challenge national labour, health, environmental and other standards before non-governmental tribunals.

The deliberations of such tribunals are secret and their verdicts are definitive and cannot be appealed against.

Pia Eberhardt, expert for trade and investment at the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), says that transnational companies around the world “are using such clauses contained in practically all FTAs to claim compensations for perfectly legitimate government policies to protect health, the environment and other public interests – because they claim these policies have the indirect effect of undermining corporate profits.”

The Brussels-based CEO, an anti-lobbying watchdog organisation, is one of the leading civil society groups questioning the TTIP. It has forced the European Commission to reveal secret protocols of the deliberations between European and U.S. government officials, and has also shown that the EC most of the time adopts the positions presented by industrial lobbyists as its own.

A typical example of such corporate actions against states is the ongoing lawsuit that U.S. tobacco company Philip Morris, based in Switzerland, launched in 2010 against Uruguay. Philip Morris is demanding two billion dollars as compensation for alleged economic losses from Uruguay, claiming that the South-American country’s anti-smoking legislation devalues its cigarette trademarks and investments.

In a similar case, the oil and gas company Lone Pine Resources is suing the Canadian government for 250 million dollars for, as the company’s lawsuit puts it, the “arbitrary, capricious and illegal revocation of (Oil Pine Resources’) valuable right to mine for oil and gas under the Saint Lawrence River.”

In 2012, Quebec’s regional government suspended fracking, the controversial method to exploit shale gas fields. According to Lone Pine Resources, the measure violates Chapter Eleven of the North American FTA.

For civil society groups in Canada, such a lawsuit is “outrageous”.

“Based on the principle of precaution, Quebec government’s response to the concerns of its population is appropriate and legitimate,” said Martine Châtelain, president of Eau Secours!, the Quebec-based coalition for a responsible management of water. “No companies should be allowed to sue a State when it implements sovereign measures to protect water and the common goods for the sake of our ecosystems and the health of our peoples.”

For Maritta Strasser, leading activist behind the German petition against the TTIP, the investor protection clauses are “a tool to blackmail legitimate governments and parliaments.”

Strasser’s fears are well founded. As a former Canadian government official has been quoted as saying, “I’ve seen the letters from the New York and DC law firms coming up to the Canadian government on virtually every new environmental regulation and proposition in the last five years. They involved dry-cleaning chemicals, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, patent law. Virtually all of the new initiatives were targeted and most of them never saw the light of day.”

For Eberhardt of CEO, the law suits against governments prove that FTAs “create two different systems of justice. One, full of privileges for corporations, and another one for the rest of the society.”

Many consumer groups are also concerned that the TTIP would facilitate the import of U.S. food stuffs, that otherwise would not satisfy present European health standards, into the European Union, such as genetically modified agricultural products, or hormone- or chemically-treated meat and poultry.

By now, even for German Economic Affairs Minister Sigmar Gabriel, “it is unconceivable that an investor protection clause would annul German or European laws.” Gabriel also opposes non-governmental tribunals ruling over conflicts between governments and corporations.

“Both the United States and Europe are democratic state structures that guarantee the rule of law,” Gabriel said. There is no reason, then, “to allow special jurisdiction tribunals to rule over our laws and over our social, environmental and health standards.”

He also demands that from now on the negotiations between the EU and the U.S. government be “carried out in the most transparent way,” adding that “if the European Commission believes that it can leave the national parliaments out of the negotiations, than the TTIP will be a sound failure.”

This has not, however, dented European Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht’s interpretation of the negotiations. “The U.S. government demands that the TTIP negations remain confidential and that the agreement contains an investor protection clause,” he told the German ZDF public television channel.

The result is that most of the protocols of the negotiations continued to be classified, as demanded by the U.S. government, and only private corporations and a restricted number of European government officials and members of the European Parliament have access to the documents.

India may be famous for the Taj Mahal, its religious ceremonies, Bollywood films and one of the highest economic growth rates in recent years. But more importantly, India has had a positive global impact through its supply of vast quantities of low-cost, good-quality generic medicines, which have saved or prolonged millions of lives.

Many people go to India to buy life-saving generic medicines from pharmacies and bring these back in suitcases to give to close relatives who cannot afford the expensive branded original products.

A decade ago, the Indian pharmaceutical company Cipla produced generic HIV/AIDS drugs that could treat a patient for 300 dollars a year, far cheaper than the branded product’s cost of 10,000 dollars per patient a year. Today the Indian generic version is even cheaper, below 80 dollars.

Martin Khor. Credit: Nic Paget-Clarke.

This has enabled millions more AIDS patients to be treated, since India supplies 70 percent of the HIV/AIDS drugs obtained by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the Global Fund and the William J. Clinton Foundation for developing countries.

A further 75-80 percent of medicines (not only for AIDS) distributed by the International Dispensary Association to developing countries come from India. No wonder India has been termed the ‘pharmacy of the developing world’.

In January 2012, the Indian Drug Manufacturers’ Association (IDMA), comprised of 700 drug-manufacturing member companies, celebrated its 50th anniversary, by toasting the industry’s high growth, wide range of medicines, and its contribution to safe, affordable drugs.

But there are also many factors that may hinder the continuation of the country’s role as chief supplier of medicines to developing countries.

A main factor of the industry’s success was the government’s decision, back in 1970, to exclude pharmaceutical drugs from product patents.

This paved the way for local companies to produce generic versions of expensive foreign drugs and within a few decades they had taken over 80 percent of the domestic market, while also supplying cheap medicines abroad.

The situation took a negative turn when the intellectual property agreement, known as TRIPS, was established in 1995 together with the World Trade Organisation, which disallowed countries from excluding medicines from patentability.

However, TRIPS allowed individual countries to determine the criteria for an invention that can be granted a patent. Furthermore, TRIPS gave governments the ability to grant a compulsory licence to local companies to produce the patented products, if their requests to patent owners for a voluntary licence did not succeed.

To implement its TRIPS obligations, India passed changes to its patent law in 2005 so that drugs could now be patented. However, the new law also contained flexibilities such as strict criteria for patentability (trivial changes to a patent-expired product would not qualify for a new patent); allowance for public opposition to a patent application before a decision is made; and compulsory licencing.

India has one of the best patent laws in the world that still gives some space to its producers to make generic drugs. But it is also true that the old policy space has been eroded because many new drugs have, since 2005, been patented by multinational companies that are selling them at exorbitant prices.

Indian companies can no longer make their own generic versions of these new medicines unless they successfully apply to the government for compulsory licences, a most cumbersome process; or unless they obtain a licence from the patent-owning multinational, which comes with stringent conditions, especially for export.

Another worry is that India is negotiating a free trade agreement (FTA) with the European Union. Such agreements usually contain provisions such as data exclusivity and extension of the patent term, which prevents or hinders generic production.

Finally, six Indian companies were recently bought up by large foreign firms. If this trend continues, the Indian drug market may be dominated by multinationals again. It is uncertain whether they will continue to supply the developing world with cheap generic medicines when this may be in conflict with their own branded products.

International health organisations such as UNAIDS, UNITAID and Doctors Without Borders have raised their serious concerns that these recent trends may threaten India’s role as the chief supplier of affordable medicines to Africa and other developing countries.

Millions will die if India cannot produce the new HIV/AIDS medicines in the future –it is a matter of life and death, said Michel Sidibe, executive director of UNAIDS, during a visit to India last year.

Thus, a strategy is needed that involves the government and the drug companies, which ensures that the local drug industry continues to thrive; that it produces not only existing medicines but also new medicines even if they are patented; and that they are supplied at cheap prices not only in India but to the developing world.

That was the sobering message that emerged during IDMA’s 50th anniversary conference in January, even in the midst of congratulations on the achievements of the past. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Martin Khor is the executive director of the South Centre in Geneva.

This column is available for visitors to the IPS website only for reading. Reproduction in print or electronic media is prohibited. Media interested in republishing may contact romacol@ips.org

Two months after a free-trade agreement between the United States and Colombia went into effect, workers and activists are warning that U.S.-stipulated labour reforms have not been fully implemented and have yet to result in promised improvements in the lives of workers.

“We ask President (Barack) Obama to push for more guarantees for Colombian workers,” Miguel Conde, with Sintrainagro, a union representing workers on palm-oil plantations, said here on Tuesday. “In Colombia, it is easier to form an armed group than a trade union … because we still have no guarantees from the government.”

Colombia today is the most dangerous place in the world to be a member of a trade union.

Further, those gathered Tuesday at the Washington headquarters of the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of trade unions in the United States, warned that much of a year-old labour agreement, meant to pave the way for the free-trade agreement (FTA), was in certain respects making things even more difficult for labour organisers in Colombia.

The FTA, although stridently opposed by a spectrum of workers and rights activists, was originally signed in late 2006 but was only passed by the U.S. Congress in October 2011. One of Washington’s prerequisites for the deal was the implementation of a 37-point Labour Action Plan (LAP), aimed at improving decades’ worth of labour rights abuses in Colombia.

According to a new report by the AFL-CIO, of those 37 points, at least nine have yet to be adopted, while the implementation of several others “can be regarded as partial or insufficient”.

The FTA came into full effect in mid-May, though only after President Barack Obama claimed, in April, that the Colombian government had already met its LAP-related commitments – just a year into what was expected to be a four-year plan.

“What happened since then is a surge in reprisals against almost all of the trade unions and labour activists that really believed in the Labour Action Plan,” Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli, a rights advocate at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a watchdog group, said at the report’s launch.

This included the Apr. 27 killing of Daniel Aguirre, a labour leader who had helped to organise Colombia’s sugarcane workers. According to Sánchez-Garzoli, 34 Colombian trade unionists have been killed since the LAP was implemented, including 11 this year alone.

Further, such figures do not capture an ongoing campaign of intimidation. According to José Luciano Sanín Vásquez, executive director of the National Trade Union School, in Medellin, Colombia, since the LAP began more than 2,900 acts of violence and 1,500 assaults have taken place, aimed at workers and labour activists.

The Colombian government dismisses such numbers as simply part of a half-century of paramilitary violence that has dogged the country.

This is in part correct, says Vásquez, but it misses the crux of the matter: as paramilitary violence has wound down in Colombia in recent years, former rebel groups have been hired by companies to provide thuggish repression of trade unions.

Tolerated, condoned, promoted

While many have been critical of certain parts of the LAP – including that it does not cover public-sector workers – those gathered here on Tuesday were quick to note the agreement’s promise if it were fully implemented.

“We think the LAP is a very positive step forward and, if properly applied, would radically change a situation that’s been systematically problematic for the past 20 years in Colombia,” WOLA’s Sánchez-Garzoli says.

But the recent spike in anti-labour violence has forced a slowdown in progress on the LAP, Jhonsson Torres, a founding member of the sugarcane union Sinalcorteros and former colleague of Daniel Aguirre, said Tuesday.

More critical is a continuing lack of political will. “Even if the different sectors want to implement the Labour Action Plan, they can’t do it,” Torres said in Spanish. “In places where the government has complied with the LAP, it has only been because they’ve been forced to do so due to strikes and other actions.”

Others point to broader issues. “There is no reason to believe that top officials are not making sincere efforts to make a change,” cautions Celeste Drake, a trade policy expert with AFL-CIO.

“The problem is these changes cannot simply be made by people with good intentions at the top. It’s a culture within the government and throughout Colombia that for years has tolerated, condoned, promoted intolerance to the exercise of worker rights.”

Citing eyewitness reports, Drake says that government ineffectiveness and corruption is leading to hesitancy in reporting labour-rights infringements, for fear that an employer – or a paramilitary group – will be notified.

Workers and activists repeatedly reference the government’s stubbornness or inability to offer judicial or even informational responses to trade unions’ LAP-related queries and requests for justice and security.

At Tuesday’s meeting, when a representative from the Colombian Embassy in Washington noted that officials were taking note of the recent allegations of violence against labour organisers, participants responded that it was unfortunate that workers needed to come all the way to the United States to get an official response.

Rallying point

The Colombian business community, meanwhile, is hesitant to make LAP-instigated pro-labour changes, for multiple reasons.

“Most businessmen still think that (these reforms) won’t progress, that soon we’ll be back where we were a year ago,” says Vásquez, speaking in Spanish. “For that reason, this part of the political message needs to reach the public in all areas of the country.”

Drake, Sánchez-Garzoli and others are urging that financial and technical assistance for building up such a culture of trust come in part from the U.S. government.

“Obama and (Colombian President Juan Manuel) Santos have clearly delivered for the multinational companies and commercial interests,” Sánchez-Garzoli says.

“That’s fine. However, they must also keep their promises to the labour and human rights community. This is a matter of U.S. legislation as well, including specific protections for trade unions.”

While many observers have been frustrated that an opportunity for a broader public debate in Colombia on labour issues has so far been missed, there remains optimism over the unique opportunity to continue organising around the LAP in the years to come.

“The Labour Action Plan, imperfect though it may be, provides hope for the future,” Drake says.

“There are now themes that workers can point to and say, ‘This is now what I’ve been promised by my government. This is what we are going to hold the government up to.’”

The entry into force of Colombia’s free trade agreement with the United States was met by student protests and opposition from a segment of the business community, small farmers, and trade unionists.

Enrique Daza: "It is easier to list the sectors that won’t be hurt by the FTA." Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

The trade deal, signed in 2006 after two years of negotiations, went into effect Tuesday after a lengthy process of modification of Colombia’s domestic laws to bring them into compliance with the agreement.

In response to the protests Tuesday, the authorities closed down public universities, as well as bus stations in Bogotá.

The day was also marked by a bomb attack against the armoured car of Fernando Londoño, a former interior and justice minister of the government of Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), which killed two of his bodyguards and injured him as well as some 30 passers-by. Another car-bomb had earlier been deactivated.

But the Colombian government celebrated the start of the free trade agreement (FTA) signed by then presidents Uribe and George W. Bush (2001-2009). President Juan Manuel Santos said the accord signed with the United States, which is already Colombia’s main export market, would boost this country’s economic growth by nearly one percent a year and create 500,000 jobs.

The FTA, which will be implemented in stages, will gradually eliminate tariffs on virtually all products traded between the two countries. It also contains provisions that regulate investment, agriculture, industry, services, telecommunications, intellectual property, public procurement, and environmental, labour, sanitary and cultural questions.

But activists, students, farmers and other critics of the FTA say Colombia yielded in a number of areas, in exchange for nothing.

To back up their arguments, they point out that President Barack Obama said the trade deal would help “achieve my goal of doubling U.S. exports.”

“But (Obama) says little to nothing about increasing imports,” Enrique Daza, the head of the Colombian Action Network Against Free Trade, told IPS.

Last year, Colombia’s exports to the United States amounted to 21.7 billion dollars, or 38 percent of this country’s total sales abroad, while imports from the U.S. stood at 13.6 billion dollars – 25 percent of Colombia’s total imports.

The FTA will have a “scandalous effect on agriculture in Colombia, especially, immediately hurting the production of cereals, because huge shipments will enter our country (from the United States) tariff-free and at subsidised prices,” Daza said.

He added that the problem is aggravated by the fact that “the government does not fully control the entry of imports because it does not have a unified customs information system.

“This means that the authorised quantity could come in through each port, multiplying the amount of tariff-free goods entering the country,” Daza said.

A 2009 report, “Impact of the U.S.-Colombia FTA on the Small Farm Economy in Colombia”, financed by Oxfam, says: “In short, Colombia guaranteed unconditional access to its domestic market for principal U.S. export products such as rice, corn (maize), wheat, barley, soybeans, beans, oil seeds, chicken, pork, high quality beef, dried milk, and whey, among others.”

“However, in contrast, the United States conditioned the entry of an important Colombian product, sugar, to a duty free quota, and did not guarantee the elimination of non-tariff barriers,” say the authors, Luis Jorge Garay, Fernando Barberi and Iván Cardona.

Under the FTA, 79,000 tonnes of tariff-free rice and 27,000 tonnes of chicken will enter Colombia from the United States in the first year alone, to the detriment of local farmers.

“Colombia’s consumer goods industry, which for years has suffered problems from the opening up of the economy, will continue to be hurt,” said Daza. “As a result, the big local industries will prefer to sell out to multinational chains, as occurred in the case of the Bavaria brewery,” which was the second-largest in South America and was acquired in 2005 by UK-based beer maker SABMiller.

Economist Juan Pablo Fernández, an adviser to the left-wing Independent Democratic Pole party, told IPS that small-scale producers of goods such as car parts, machinery and home appliances “will become mere importers, in the best of cases.”

Activists estimate that 350,000 small-scale beef and dairy farmers will be hurt by competition from beef imported from the United States.

Meanwhile, cut flowers from Colombia, which cover nearly 80 percent of demand in the U.S., will be directly affected by the strengthening of the peso against the dollar which, according to Daza, “is essential to the FTA, which states that intervention in the domestic foreign exchange market is considered anti-competitive.”

To all this is added the crisis facing the coffee industry. “We don’t have enough beans, so coffee is imported from Guatemala and Vietnam, to meet domestic demand,” he added.

With respect to which sectors will be affected by the FTA, Daza said “it is easier to list the ones that won’t be hurt, such as some importers and those who will profit from the economic activities of the state, like businesspeople who are already benefiting from trade globalisation policies.”

And Colombia is in an even more disadvantageous position because in eight years of negotiations it did not upgrade railways, rivers or ports in preparation for the changes to be brought by the FTA.

In other words, said Daza, “the negotiators of the agreement threw the country into the jaws of the multinationals.”

The treaty will also lead to an increase in poor-quality jobs in the informal sector, which is “the way to boost profit margins, like what has occurred in the flower business, palm oil plantations and small-scale mining,” he added.

The Oxfam report, meanwhile, states that the negotiation of the FTA did not even take into consideration issues that were described at the start as essential, such as Colombia’s decades-long civil war, “the importance of the welfare of the rural population to the economic, social and political stability of Colombia,” and “the need to create profitable alternatives to illicit crops.”

The negotiation, the authors say, “was governed exclusively by commercial interests.”

* With reporting by Constanza Vieira (END)