Greenpeace, the environmental group, has just released leaked documents revealing just how destructive American negotiators have been in negotiating the proposed U.S. - E.U. free-trade agreement known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
This treaty, if implemented, would cover the world's two largest economies - the E.U. as a whole is bigger than the U.S. - and contain provisions covering telecom, agriculture, textiles, intellectual property, finance and compatibility between U.S. and E.U. regulatory systems.
You can download the leaked documents here.
America's trade negotiators never seem to defend America's economic interests, but they somehow seem to find plenty to time for undermining other nation's environmental and consumer protections!
We've been hearing for years about how trade agreements are used to weaken environmental, labor, and consumer protections. Bu this is the first time we've had detailed documentation of how these negotiations are actually played out, line by line.
American and European trade officials haven't denied the authenticity of the leaked documents, but they have insisted that they represent merely "negotiating positions," i.e. not actual likely outcomes. This is probably true, but a party's negotiating position tells us what they are trying to achieve, which is precisely what we need to know.
The documents reveal that the European negotiators encountered especial aggressiveness by the Americans regarding the following issues:
- Attempts to weaken longstanding provisions in international trade law that protect "human, animal and plant life or health" and "conservation of exhaustible natural resources."
- Attempts to undermine provisions designed to fight climate change, a/k/a global warming.
- Attempts to weaken product regulation by dialing back the so-called "precautionary principle" the E.U. uses, in which a mere threat to consumer safety, for example, is unacceptable.
- Attempts to give corporations and their lobbyists greater say in trade-agreement decision-making
Specific flashpoints included animal testing of cosmetics and increasing the number of genetically modified foods allowed to be sold in Europe.
Jorgo Riss, director of Greenpeace E.U., said,
These leaked documents confirm what we have been saying for a long time: T.T.I.P. would put corporations at the center of policy making, to the detriment of environment and public health. We have known that the E.U. position was bad, now we see the U.S. position is even worse. A compromise between the two would be unacceptable.
UPDATE 05/05/16: These disclosures seem to be reverberating a bit.