Talks on US-led Pacific trade deal stall

Ministers from 12 nations negotiating a Pacific Rim trade pact hold a news conference in Lahaina, Hawaii, Friday, saying they made significant progress in reaching an agreement.

Hitting a strident note, Malaysia’s global Trade Minister Mustapa Mohamed had said the signing of the TPP agreement “will not happen in Hawaii”.

“While nothing is agreed until everything is agreed, I would say we have taken provisional decisions on more than 90 per cent of issues and during my involvement in TPP negotiations this has been by far the most productive meeting at both ministerial and officials’ level”, he said.

All reports agree that America’s stance on biologic drugs, that data from patient trials should be proprietary for 12 years, set it at odds with practically all the other countries involved in the talks.

The controversial and secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations have stalled once again.

Failure to seal the agreement is a setback for U.S. President Barack Obama.

As the talks entered their final hours, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from the tobacco-growing state of Kentucky who will be influential in garnering votes in Congress for the deal, added his weight to warnings against excluding tobacco from rules allowing foreign companies to sue host governments over policies that harm their business. These include: Australia, Canada, Chile, Japan, and the United States.

In a statement, the organisation said that as pressure to conclude TPP negotiations mounts, “So does rhetoric and the proliferation of misperceptions surrounding supply management through certain attacks in the media, and by some think tanks and those with vested interests”.

Looking at the list of TPP negotiating countries, it shows that numerous countries do not have many GIs and tend to line up on the trademark side, at least in contentious discussions at the World Intellectual Property Organization (IPW, WIPO, 30 July 2015).

The TPP – already eight years in the making – would be a huge free-trade bloc encompassing 40 percent of the world’s economy and part of Obama’s much-vaunted “pivot” towards Asia in the face of an increasingly assertive China.

“The problem is if we don’t get it done in the next two or three weeks then the reality is it would probably be hard to do until the end of 2017”, Petersen said.

Trade agreements have spread across the region. “A good agreement will provide significantly improved opportunities for Australian farmers to sell products to markets we know are demanding high quality food and fibre”, it said in a statement.

The remaining issues mainly involved the “big four” economies of the United States, Canada, Japan and Mexico. This pact would cover 16 countries, including the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations as well as Australia, India, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand. “We were active constructive partners at the table”.