NAFTA’S Chapter 19 a potential big issue
Politico | 14 June 2017
NAFTA’S Chapter 19 a potential big issue
By ADAM BEHSUDI
Canada and Mexico should push very hard to preserve Chapter 19 of the original NAFTA agreement, which created a mechanism to resolve disputes over anti-dumping and countervailing duty measures, despite a push by the United States to remove it from the pact, a former Mexican official said.
“I would definitely put a red line on Chapter 19,” Antonio Ortiz-Mena, a senior adviser at the Albright Stonebridge Group, said during a discussion Tuesday at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The three countries should also coordinate more closely on competition policy to minimize the number of anti-dumping and countervailing duty cases filed against each other’s goods, he added.
On another tough issue, Daniel Trefler, an international economics professor at the University of Toronto, argued Canada and Mexico should resist U.S. pressure to increase patent and copyright protections, arguing that some recent studies show that lengthy intellectual property right terms actually stifle innovation rather than increase it.
He also advocated that the revised NAFTA agreement provide no more than 8 years of test data protections for biologics, despite the 12 years guaranteed in U.S. law. However, the Obama administration’s failure to get 12 years of data protection for biologics in the Trans-Pacific Partnership was one reason it enjoyed only lukewarm Republican support.
