What’s all the fuss about this secretly-negotiated international trade agreement with the long name? The Trans-Pacific Partnership, as a name, has a positive ring to it. But for the relative few who have been trying to find out what it is about, it could have frightening effects on a range of issues from the environment, health, food safety, workers’ rights, and Internet freedom.
How can you sum it all up? Check the graphic on the left, produced by 350.org. (the graphic is not very clear, but you will get a sense of the issues)
This is how the NGO, Expose the TPP, puts it:
The Trans-Pacific Partnership n. 1. A “free trade” agreement that would set rules on non-trade matters such as food safety, internet freedom, medicine costs, financial regulation, and the environment. 2. A binding international governance system that would require the United States, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and any other country that signs on to conform their domestic policies to its rules. 3. A secret trade negotiation that has included over 600 official corporate “trade advisors” while hiding the text from Members of Congress, governors, state legislators, the press, civil society, and the public.
Check out Expose the TPP for more details.
Leaked documents from the negotiations indicate important reasons for public concern and have helped fuel protest groups, seeking to derail the agreement.
The TPP agreement appears to threaten countries’ sovereignty and allow foreign companies to sue governments and force through projects that might have negative environmental and health effects, besides a raft of other issues.
Below is a relatively brief rundown from the point of view of Americans who may be worried by the trade deal. Similar concerns will affect all the countries that sign up to this agreement.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership Would Threaten the Environment – Affecting the Water We Drink and the Air We Breathe
The TPP could sharply increase U.S. exports of natural gas – creating incentives for more fracking. The Department of Energy could lose its authority to regulate exports of natural gas to countries that have signed a “free trade” agreement with the U.S. that includes “national treatment for trade in gas.” The TPP could eliminate the government’s prerogative to determine whether the mass export of natural gas to TPP countries – including Japan, the world’s largest natural gas importer – is in the public interest. The resulting surge in natural gas exports would not only raise gas and electricity prices for consumers, but would ramp up the dangerous, chemical-laden practice of fracking.
Through the “investor-state” system, the TPP would allow corporations operating in TPP countries to launch a case against domestic environmental laws that they see as inhibiting “expected future profits.”
Governments have paid over $3 billion to foreign corporations in investor-state disputes under existing U.S. trade and investment deals. Over 85% has been handed to corporations attacking oil, mining, gas, and other environmental and natural resource policies. This includes the Mexican government paying the U.S. Metalclad firm over denial of an operating permit for a contaminated toxic waste facility and the Canadian government paying U.S. firms Abitibi-Bowater over water rights, SD Meyers over a ban on trans-boundary trade in hazardous waste implemented under the Basel Convention, and Pope and Talbot over timber policy. Exxon-Mobil just won a case over a Canadian province’s offshore oil regulations and a case has been filed against Quebec’s moratorium on fracking.
Corporations have also used investor-state cases as pressure tactics to avoid having to pay for environmental damages. After an 18-year struggle to get Chevron to clean up billions of gallons of toxics it released into Amazonian streams and rivers used by local inhabitants for drinking water and into open pools in the jungle, an Ecuadorean court ordered the corporation to pay $18 billion for cleanup. Chevron turned to an “investor-state” tribunal under the U.S.-Ecuador Bilateral Investment Treaty as a last chance to evade justice. In February 2012, that tribunal ordered Ecuador’s government to interfere with the country’s independent court system to halt enforcement of the ruling. Though an Ecuadorean court rejected the tribunal’s order, the tribunal may still prevent the cleanup from starting if its ruling is recognized by other countries whose cooperation is needed to collect the $18 billion from Chevron.
Even the mere threat of an investor-state loss can pressure governments to weaken environmental and health policies. In the 1990s, a U.S. chemical company called Ethyl Corporation challenged a Canadian environmental ban of the gasoline additive MMT, considered a dangerous toxin, under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) investor-state provisions. Although many U.S. states ban the substance and the investor-state tribunal made no final ruling, an intermediate loss was enough to push the Canadian government to revoke the ban, settle with the foreign corporation for $13 million in taxpayer compensation and issue a public statement that the chemical was safe.
For more information, check out Expose the TPP.
