For Immediate Release:
Nov. 5, 2015
Contact:
Nick Florko (202) 454-5108
Valerie Holford (301) 926-1298
Secret TPP Text Unveiled: It’s Worse Than We Thought,
With Limits on Food Safety and Controversial Investor-State System Expanded,
Rollback of Bush-Era Medicine Access and Environmental Terms
Pact’s Fate in Congress Uncertain at Best; Long-Awaited
Text Reveals Gaps Between Administration Claims and Actual TPP Terms On Key
Congressional, Public Concerns
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today’s long-awaited release of
the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) reveals that the pact
replicates many of the most controversial terms of past pacts that promote job offshoring
and push down U.S wages while further expanding the scope of the controversial
investor-state system and rolling back improvements on access to affordable
medicines and environmental standards that congressional Demo crats forced on
the George W. Bush administration in 2007.
“Apparently, the TPP’s proponents resorted to such
extreme secrecy during negotiations because the text shows that the TPP would
offshore more American jobs, lower our wages, flood us with unsafe imported food
and expose our laws to attack in foreign tribunals,” said Lori Wallach,
director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “When the administration says
it used the TPP to renegotiate NAFTA, few expected that meant doubling down on
the worst jo b-killing, wage-suppressing NAFTA terms, expanding limits on food
safety and rolling back past reforms on environmental standards and access to
affordable drugs.”
On some key issues, the text reveals provisions that
will cost TPP support from members of Congress who supported the narrow passage
of Fast Track trade authority this summer, and affirm for the many members of
Congress who backed past trade deals but opposed Fast Track that the TPP must
be stopped.
“Many in Congress said they would support the TPP
only if, at a minimum, it included past reforms made to trade pact intellectual
property rules affecting access to affordable medicines. But the TPP rolls back
that past progress by requiring new marketing exclusivities and patent term
extensions, and provides pharmaceutical firms with new monopoly rights for
biotech drugs, including many new and forthcoming cancer treatments,” said
Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program. “The
terms in this final TPP text will contribute to preventable suffering and death
abroad, and may constrain the reforms that Congress can consider to reduce
Americans’ medicine prices at home.”
The text also confirms that demands made by Congress
and key constituencies were not fulfilled. “From leaks, we knew quite a bit
about the agreement, but in chapter after chapter , the final text is worse than
we expected with the demands of the 500 official U.S. trade advisers
representing corporate interests satisfied to the detriment of the public interest,”
said Wallach.
Today’s text release confirms concerns about the TPP
that were based on earlier leaks and reveals ways in which the TPP rolls back
past public interest reforms to the U.S. trade model and expands anti-public interest
provisions demanded by the hundreds of official U.S. corporate trade advisers:
Worse anti-public-interest provisions relative to
past U.S. trade pacts.
·
The TPP Intellectual Property Chapter would roll back the “May
2007” reforms for access to medicines.
·
The TPP Environment Chapter would roll back the “May 2007”
reforms by eliminating most of the seven Multilateral Environmental Agreements
that past pacts have enforced.
·
The TPP Investment Chapter would expand the scope of policies
that can be challenged and the basis for such challenges, including for the
first time ever allowing investor-state dispute settlement ( ISDS ) enforcement
of World Trade Organization intellectual property terms and new challenges to
financial regulations.
·
With Japanese, Australian and other firms newly empowered to
launch ISDS attacks against the United States, the TPP would double U.S. ISDS
exposure with more than 9,200 additional subsidiaries operating here of
corporations from TPP nations newly empowered to launch ISDS cases against the
U. S. government. (About 9,500 U.S. subsidiaries have ISDS rights under ALL
existing U.S. investor-state-enforced pacts.)
·
The TPP E-Commerce Chapter would undermine consumer privacy
protections for sensitive personal health, financial and other data when it
crosses borders by exposing such policies to challenge as a violation of the
TPP limits on regulation of data flows.
·
TPP “Sanitary and Phytosanitary” chapter terms would impose new
limits on imported food safety relative to past pacts. This includes new
challenges to U.S. border inspection systems that can be launched based on
extremely subjective requirements that inspections must “limited to what is reasonable
and necessary” as determine by a TPP tribunal. New language that replicates the
industry demand for a so-called Rapid Response Mechanism that requires border
inspectors to notify exporters for every food safety check that finds a problem
and give the exporter the right to bring a challenge to that port inspection
determination s – meaning new right s to bring a trade challenge to individual border
inspection decisions (including , potentially , laboratory or other testing)
that second-guesses U.S. inspectors and creates a chilling effect that would
deter rigorous oversight of imported foods.
Anti-public interest provisions that are the same
as past U.S. pacts.
·
The TPP Investment Chapter would eliminate many of the risks and
costs of relocating American jobs to low-wage countries, incentivizing more
American job offshoring.
·
The TPP procurement chapter would offshore our tax dollars to
create jobs overseas instead of at home by giving firms operating in any TPP
nation equal access to many U.S. government procurement contracts, rather than
us continuing to give preference to local firms to build and maintain our
public libraries, parks, post offices and universities.
·
Contrary to Fast Track negotiating objectives,
the TPP would grant foreign firm’s greater rights than domestic firms enjoy
under U.S. law and in U.S. courts. One class of interests – foreign firms – could
privately enforce this public treaty by skirting domestic laws and courts to
challenge U.S. federal, state and local decisions and policies on grounds not
available in U.S. law and do so before extrajudicial ISDS tribunals authorized
to order payment of unlimited sums of taxpayer dollars.
·
There are no new safeguards that limit ISDS
tribunals’ discretion to issue ever-expanding interpretations of governments’
obligations to investors and order compensation on that basis. The text reveals
the same “safeguard” Annexes and terms that were included in U.S. pacts since
the 2005 Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) that have failed to rein
in ISDS tribunals. CAFTA tribunals have simply ignored the “safeguard” provisions
that are replicated in the TPP , and as with past pacts, in the TPP such
tribunal , conduct is not subject to appeal.
·
The TPP would ban the
use of capital controls and other macroprudential financial regulations used to
prevent speculative bubbles and financial crises.
Please see a bullet point analysis of key TPP
investment, food safety, labor and environmental, market access, rules of
origin, procurement and other provisions prepared by labor and public interest
experts for more details. More detailed analyses of each chapter will be
available next week.
The TPP can take effect only if the U.S. Congress
approve s it , given the rules specifiying the conditions that must be met for
the TPP to go into effect. The TPP’s fate in Congress is uncertain at best
given that since the trade authority vote, the small bloc of members of the
U.S. House of Representatives who made the narrow margin of passage possible
have expressed concerns that the text release shows were not addressed.
Ten U.S. presidential candidates have pushed anti-TPP
messages in their campaigning, stoking U.S. voters’ ire about the pact.
An unprecedented number and wide array of
organizations oppose any attempt to railroad the TPP through Congress by using
the Fast Track process. Groups united on this extend well beyond labor unions and
include consumer, Internet freedom, senior, health, food safety, environmental,
human rights, faith, LGBTQ, student and civil rights organizations.
“Now that Congress and the public can scrutinize the
actual text, the reality that it fails to meet Congress’ demands and its terms
would be harmful to most Americans will replace the administration’s myth-based
sales job for the TPP, further dimming the T PP’s prospects in Congress,”
Wallach said.
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