International "free trade" agreements don't often make it onto the evening news, despite their potentially far-reaching impacts on jobs, local farms, environmental protection, food safety, labor standards, financial regulation and practically every other area of state and federal governance. Currently, a whole "alphabet soup" of new international trade and investment agreements, including the TPP, TTIP and TISA, are being negotiated in secret, with little or no input from the public.
Only through a series of leaks has there been any information available concerning ongoing talks regarding the Trans Pacific
Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement between the US and 11 other Asia-Pacific nations. And while the Obama administration is pressuring Congress to expedite passage of the pact through its "fast track" authority, even our elected representatives have not been fully briefed on what's actually in it. However, the TPP talks have not been kept secret from 600 corporate lawyers and lobbyists representing some of the largest multinational firms in the world in the negotiations. (See Free Press 1/9/2014: "Looming Trade Deal Raises Concerns About Impacts on Jobs and Farms in Maine".)
"Governments around the globe are currently engaged in the biggest flurry of trade and investment treaty negotiations since the 'roaring nineties,' when the belief in the virtues of liberalized market forces was at its peak. The shock of the 2008 global financial crisis appears to have been forgotten," begins a very critical report by Public Services International, a union representing 20 million public-sector workers in 154 countries. "Official enthusiasm for more intrusive, '21st century' treaties is at a level not seen since the creation of the World Trade Or-ganization (WTO) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the mid-1990s."
Although trade tariffs are at historical lows, business organizations like the Business Roundtable assert that these new investment pacts are not just about lowering taxes on imports and exports. Their goal is to also "harmonize barriers to investment." Critics say "harmonize" is just a code word for driving environmental, labor and consumer protections down to the lowest common denominator.
Trade agreement provisions known as "investor-state dispute settlements" allow companies to sue governments in private international tribunals over rules and regulations that threaten to limit investor profits. For example, in 2012 the Swedish power company Vattenfall used the mechanism to sue Germany for $3.7 billion when the country decided to phase out nuclear power. Last year, the energy company Lone Pine used the investor-state settlement provision in NAFTA to bring a $250 million lawsuit against Quebec for imposing a moratorium on controversial shale gas extraction techniques known as "fracking."
These provisions have the potential to tie the hands of local governments and threaten state sovereignty, says Rep. Sharon Treat (D-Hallowell), chair of the Maine Citizen Trade Policy Commission and a trade advisor to the Obama administration.
"Tobacco regulations, environmental laws, public health regulations, whatever. They get to sue and bring it to a three-person arbitration panel and essentially go around the court system," said Treat.
According to Treat, because of the strict secrecy policies, she is prohibited from talking with or seeking advice from outside experts about what little she is able to glean from the negotiations. On the other side, Treat notes that the 600 industry advisors involved in the talks are able to devote their full-time attention and expertise to the negotiations, giving them a much bigger advantage over public advocacy groups. After strong opposition to the TPP from activists, it's unlikely the measure will be fast-tracked by Congress before November. However, Treat noted that the TPP could be taken up in a lame-duck session of Congress following the November election.
TTIP & Farming, GMO Labeling and Toxic Chemicals
Meanwhile, a new pending free trade agreement with the European Union called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is raising questions about its potential impact on Maine's local-food purchasing policies as well as toxic chemical regulation and GMO labeling. At a meeting of the Maine Citizen Trade Policy Commission on June 26, Karen Hansen-Kuhn, the director of International Strategies at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, expressed concerns that Maine's policies requiring public institutions to purchase a certain amount of locally produced food, such as farm-to-school programs, could be threatened by the TTIP as the laws could present a "barrier to international investment."
Hansen-Kuhn also noted that the EU has a policy of using the "pre-cautionary principle," which puts the burden of proof on companies to prove something is not harmful before it is allowed to be sold for consumption. With the exception of medicine, the US has the opposite policy. Some US fruit producers have argued that an EU ban on diphenylamine (DPA), a pesticide used on apples and pears, also presents a barrier to investment. EU officials are concerned that DPA can combine with nitrogen while the fruit is in storage to produce toxic nitrosamines, a chemical shown to cause cancer in laboratory animals.
-
Company DirectoryFreight RateExport RateAgency PartnershipCargo Leads