The Trans-Pacific Free Trade Agreement: NAFTA for the Pacific Rim?

Read the Citizens Trade Campaign’s new background memo on the Trans-Pacific FTA

Trade negotiators from the United States and eight other countries have been busily negotiating the Trans-Pacific Free Trade Agreement (FTA) — sometimes called the Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP.  This regional trade deal currently includes Vietnam, Brunei Darussalam, Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia, Peru and Chile, but is also intended as a “docking agreement” that other Pacific Rim countries would join over time, such as Indonesia, Russia, Japan, the Philippines and possibly even China.

The Obama administration’s recent embrace of the Bush-negotiated Korea, Panama and Colombia Free Trade Agreements leaves many worried that the Trans-Pacific FTA will become nothing but a massive new NAFTA-style agreement.  Indeed, while not all the negotiating text for the FTA has yet been released, it is already clear that trade negotiators are using past free trade agreements as their basic starting point for this one.

The ongoing, multi-year negotiations over the Trans-Pacific FTA are supposed to conclude by November 2011.  Even if that date slips, as is now expected, the window of opportunity for preventing the FTA from becoming a new “NAFTA for the Pacific Rim” is rapidly closing.  Here are some of the questions yet to be answered:

• Labor rights: Will the Trans-Pacific FTA include labor standards based on International Labor Organization conventions, and if included, how will they be enforced?
• Investment Provisions: Will the Trans-Pacific FTA include so-called “investor-to-state” provisions that allow individual corporations to challenge environmental, consumer and other public interest policies as barriers to trade?
• Public Procurement: Will the Trans-Pacific FTA respect nations’ and communities’ right to set purchasing preferences that keep taxpayer dollars re-circulating in local economies?
• Access to Medicines: Will the Trans-Pacific FTA allow governments to produce and/or obtain affordable, generic medications for sick people?
• Agriculture: Will the Trans-Pacific FTA allow countries to ensure that farmers and farm workers are fairly compensated, while also preventing the agricultural dumping that has forced so many family farmers off their land?

If labor, environmental, family farm, consumer, faith, immigrant rights, human rights and other social justice advocates don’t force Trans-Pacific FTA negotiations into the public light, the answers to these questions aren’t likely to be ones we’ll be happy with.

International trade policies can be designed to lift labor, environmental and human rights standards and living conditions at home and abroad — but only if we demand it.

Trans-Pacific Trade Negotiations: We Need a Fair Deal or No Deal

Trade negotiators will be meeting in Chicago in September 2011 click here to learn about demonstrations and educational events taking place while they’re in town, and click here to sign our petition urging a “Fair Deal or No Deal.”

Find more info and resources on the Trans-Pacific Partnership by clicking here.