Pacific trade-deal nations commit to refrain from currency wars

Overnight, thousands of pages of text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership have been released, ending months of secrecy. Peter Jennings, from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said the deal was as important strategically as it was in trade and economic terms.

Our Kim In-kyung has more.

However, the full text of the TPP deal has been marked as “subject to legal review” so that provisions which seem irrelevant could be removed or altered according to the member nations’ requirements.

Australia’s Trade Minister has said the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), alongside free trade agreements such as the one signed with China, will form the cornerstone of Australia’s post-mining boom economy, after details of the TPP were released overnight. He expects it to be signed by the 12 countries and then ratified a few time in the first half of 2016.

In particular, it said the South Korea-U.S. FTA will eliminate tariffs on 95-point-eight percent of all South Korean goods sold in the USA beginning in 2017, allowing South Korea to maintain its advantage in the US market for the time being.

Congress has made clear it sees currency manipulation as a big problem for US exporters and pressed the Obama Administration to address it as part of the TPP talks, as have a few manufacturers, such as Ford Motor Company.

However, the government expected more competition for machinery, electrical and electronic goods.

As the Citizens Trade Campaign analysis shows, the TPP would actually “expand USA liability by widening the scope of domestic policies and government actions that could be challenged” under ISDS rules.

Robb said years of careful negotiations had led to the best deal for Australia, which now has greater freedom to export commodities such as sugar, beef, dairy and rice, as well as a number of services and materials. The United States demand would have meant Australians waiting longer before cheaper versions of pharmaceuticals became available.

“The TPP means that America will write the rules of the road in the 21st century…”

Congress granted the president so-called fast track authority on trade deals in June, with the help of Republicans, ensuring the treaty will receive an up-or-down vote without amendments. Chapter 18 of the TPP [PDF] highlights that signatories must impose penalties for copyright infringement including “sentences of imprisonment as well as monetary fines sufficiently high to provide a deterrent to future acts of infringement”.

A leading expert on intellectual property has warned that Australian governments could be sued for billions of dollars by foreign companies under a controversial clause in a huge multilateral trade deal.

Another concern related to intellectual property is the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) process, which FFTF opposes on principle as an anti-democratic system. “The words “climate change” don’t even appear in the text, a dead giveaway that this isn’t a 21st-century trade deal”, said Michael Brine, executive director of the Sierra Club.

The people and governments of Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam now have the opportunity to judge whether the trade deal will be successful and come into force.

What it does do, however, is give “fossil fuel companies the extraordinary ability to sue local governments that try and keep fossil fuels in the ground”, Kowalski continued.