The Huffington Post is reporting that negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal – the proposed regional trade agreement between 12 Pacific Rim countries, including Australia – are “dead in the water”:
The multilateral talks… have stalled. There have already been more than 20 rounds of negotiations, the details of which have been kept secret.
Doug Porter, chief economist at Bank of Montreal believes the chances of talks settling outstanding issues are slim.
“I’m not optimistic on those talks at least not over the next three years or so,” he said during a panel discussion for the Toronto Region Board of Trade.
“The reality of the situation is unless the U.S. gets fast-track authority (for a free trade negotiation) it’s going nowhere … The multilateral nature of these talks means that if everybody isn’t cooperating then it’s not happening.”
U.S. president Barack Obama has faced difficulty in getting Congress on board with the trade talks and has not been able to convince politicians to give the White House “fast-track authority,” which would allow Obama to sign the deal without a debate in Congress.
Regular readers will know that I am a staunch critic of the TPP and fear that it would establish a US-style regulatory structure that would hand considerable power to US pharmaceutical and digital firms, limiting choice and raising prices for consumers in Australia.
I am also not alone in my concerns.
Former World Trade Organisation (WTO) director-general, Supachai Panitchpakdi, has slammed the TPP, claiming that it represents a step backwards to the days before the WTO when the US and Europe controlled the global trading system to the detriment of other economies.
Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, raised similar fears in an open letter posted last year, whereby he questioned negotiators’ secrecy and warned about “grave risks on all sorts of topics” posed by the TPP, as well as claiming that it contains “many of the worst features of the worst laws in the TPP countries, making needed reforms extremely difficult if not impossible”.
Paul Krugman, another nobel prize winning economist and trade expert, has also slammed the TPP, noting that it would “increase the ability of certain corporations to assert control over intellectual property [including] drug patents and movie rights”. Krugman also claimed that “there isn’t a compelling case for this deal, from either a global or a national point of view”, and that the “economic case is weak, at best”, with “the push for T.P.P… weirdly out of touch with both economic and political reality”.
Unfortunately for Australia, the Abbott Government has so far been a strong supporter of the TPP. Trade Minister, Andrew Robb, had previously described the deal as a “platform for 21st-century trade rules”, and has hailed the TPP as “ambitious” and “reducing protection”.
We should all be thankful that negotiations appear to be on ice, in light of the risks posed to Australia’s sovereignty and consumer welfare arising from the TPP. As long as US in-fighting continues, deadlines will continue to get pushed into the future, and enthusiasm for the TPP amongst the 12 Pacific Rim countries will likely wane, lessening the chance that a deal will eventually be struck.
