What the Heck Is the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Why Should You Care? Andrew Amelinckx - Modern Farmer
go to original March 20, 2015

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) could cost us our internet freedom, labor rights, access to affordable medicine, the safety of our food, and protections that keep our water and air clean. (ExposeTheTPP)

Wikileaks publishes leaked draft of secretive international agreement TPP. Download the full secret TPP treaty IP chapter as a PDF here

The TPP is the largest proposed free trade agreement deal in history, representing close to 40 percent of the world’s economy. The negotiations have been ongoing for several years and now involve 12 nations, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Chile, New Zealand and Australia, among others. The secrecy of the deal-making has been strict, with the little information available mostly coming from WikiLeaks, which released portions of the draft proposal last year.

According to Joshua Meltzer, a fellow in Global Economy and Development at the Brookings Institution, secrecy is typical when governments are working out trade agreements, but he believes they are getting close to inking the deal.

“I think they are close. I think they’re down to the traditionally hard issues - they’ve identified the issues that would require high-level political attention,” says Meltzer, who is also an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies.

“This not only damages health when good public policies are taken away, but it often deters governments from enacting new policies for fear of litigation,” says Hirono.

Katie Hirono, a researcher at the University of New South Wales’ Centre for Health Equity, Training, Research and Evaluation, says while “it’s understandable that negotiators need some level of discretion in developing an agreement, without involvement of outside experts and some level of transparency on the potential impacts of the trade agreement, there’s no way for governments to guarantee that these agreements won’t negatively impact people.”

She says the “scale and complexity” of the agreement, and the fact that the commitments are binding, requires “meticulous and detailed analysis by health experts.”

Read the rest at Modern Farmer

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