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CPTPP

The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP, or also known as TPP11) is a trade and investment agreement that was signed on 7 March 2018, after ten years of negotiation, between 11 Pacific Rim countries.

It began as an agreement between the four Pacific states of Brunei Darussalam, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore. The P4 (Pacific 4), as it was then known, was signed on 3 June 2005 and came into force on 1 January 2006 as the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership.

In September 2008, the US Trade Representative announced that the US would seek entry into the P4 agreement. For Washington, the P4 offered a neoliberal agenda-friendly platform to expand US economic and strategic interests in Asia. A few months later, the governments of Australia, Peru and Vietnam announced their intention to join as well. Malaysia, Mexico, and Canada joined the negotiations in 2010, while Japan joined in 2013. The US quickly assumed leadership of the whole negotiating process of the now called Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP or TPPA).

The TPP was signed in New Zealand on 4 February 2016. But on 23 January 2017, the new US President Donald Trump signed an executive order formally withdrawing the US from the trade pact. On 21 May 2017, on the margin of the APEC forum in Vietnam, the remaining members agreed to conclude talks on an alternative arrangement of the deal without the US by November.

The remaining 11 countries signed the newly-dubbed Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership on 8 March 2018.

Over the years, trade unions, advocacy groups, internet freedom activists, indigenous peoples, environmentalists, health professionals and elected officials criticised and protested against the treaty because it was designed to extend and concentrate corporate power at the expense of people’s rights.

For instance, by granting corporations and investors enormous privileges, the CPTPP helps to to further undermine conditions and wages for workers which have already been eroded by other trade and investment agreements.

Among other controversial clauses, the CPTPP parties agreed to enhance cooperation on certain activities related to agricultural biotechnology. The treaty requires member states to ratify the UPOV Convention of 1991, a kind of patent system for seeds. This will expand the market for privatised genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and hybrids, and threaten traditional seeds and knowledge.

The CPTPP’s chapter on regulatory coherence forces a signatory government to engage with “interested persons” when it intends to strengthen public policies. This means that companies from CPTPP countries are given the ability to provide input to national policy making in other member states. Governments also have to conduct regulatory impact assessments, justifying the “need for a regulation” and exploring “feasible alternatives” before proceeding.

Finally, the CPTPP’s sweeping investment chapter extends transnational companies ability to challenge public policies related to health, the environment (the treaty fails to mention climate change even once) or labour. It includes the controversial investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism that allows corporations to sue a state if a new regulation hampers their expected profits or investment potentials.

Mexico ratified the treaty on 28 June 2018, followed by Japan on 6 July, Singapore on 19 July, New Zealand on 25 October, Canada on 29 October, Australia on 31 October and Vietnam on 15 November. The Treaty went into force on 30 December 2018 among the members who have ratified it.

The text of the agreement is available here: https://www.bilaterals.org/?tpp-trans-pacific-partnership

last update: July 2021
Photo: Chile Mejor Sin TLC


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Leaked Trans-Pacific FTA texts reveal US undermining access to medicine
Leaks of US proposals for the Trans-Pacific free trade agreement reveal that the Obama administration has reversed reforms designed to enhance access to affordable medicines made during the George W Bush administration and is instead demanding new rights for pharmaceutical firms to challenge pricing and other drug formulary policies used by many developed countries to keep down prices,
TPPA ’threatens national sovereignty’
Despite the secrecy, there are some intrepid souls who are mounting opposition to the Trans Pacific Partnership. Interview with one of them, Jane Kelsey, a professor of law at the University of Auckland and long-term academic activist in the area of free trade and investment agreements.
Civil society platform on IP in the Trans Pacific Partnership
Eight civil society groups have released a platform on the intellectual property and health content of the Trans Pacific Partnership. The platform calls ex-officio border measures “inappropriate,” rejects a “one size fits all” regime for patent validity, and warns against using the suggested retail price or rightholder-submitted measurements of value in the determination of damages for IP infringement.
Business leaders call for Japan’s participation in TPP talks
Japanese and U.S. business leaders on Friday jointly urged the government to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade talks soon, as the nine countries involved in the multilateral free trade framework aim to reach agreement on a broad outline in November.
Pacific negotiators seeking trade accord to target labor rights, US Says
The Pacific partnership, if successful, may eventually expand to include Japan and China, Calman Cohen, president of the Washington-based Emergency Committee for American Trade, a business organization whose members include Citigroup, General Motors and Target, said.
US seeks to allay drug access concerns in TPP talks
The Obama administration on Monday sought to allay concerns that the U.S. push for stronger drug patent protections in a Transpacific trade deal would raise the cost of life-saving treatments out of the reach of the region’s poor people.
The false promise of Obama’s trade deals
US proposals for the TPP hardly break from the Nafta mold, and many weaken or eliminate the few important advances we’ve seen since Nafta in US trade proposals, write Kevin Gallagher and Timothy Wise in The Guardian
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Jim Robinson, president of the United Steelworkers of America District 7, joined his fellow steelworkers and 1,000 others to protest in Chicago on Labor Day against a new free trade agreement being negotiated for the Pacific Rim countries.
The Activist Beat
On Labor Day, 500 activists took to the streets of Chicago to speak out against the US free trade agreement with Pacific Rim countries, including Peru, Chile, and Vietnam. Advocates from labor, environmental, public health, and consumer rights groups took part to demand a “Fair Deal or No Deal.”

    Links


  • AFTINET TPP site
    Web page on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement maintained by the Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network
  • Expose the TPP
    The TPP would expand and lock in corporate power. At the heart of the TPP are new rights allowing thousands of multinational corporations to sue the U.S. government before a panel of three corporate lawyers who can award unlimited sums to be paid by America’s taxpayers. Only six of its 30 chapters actually cover “trade.”
  • Help free the TPP!
    The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement—which some have come to refer to as "NAFTA on steroids"—could ultimately affect the lives of billions of people worldwide. Neither the public, the press, nor even the US Congress knows the full extent of what’s in the text being negotiated—but corporate lobbyists know what it contains. Help us raise a reward for WikiLeaks should it publish the negotiating text of the TPP!
  • It’s our future
    Website on the implications of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement for New Zealand
  • Mexico Mejor Sin TPP
    Convergencia de Organizaciones Sociales y Ciudadanxs contra el Acuerdo Transpacífico de Cooperación Económica (TPP por sus siglas en inglés)
  • Moana Nui 2011
    Pua Mohala I Ka Po in collaboration with the International Forum on Globalization presents an international conference on Pacific transitions: "Moana Nui: Pacific peoples, lands and economies", November 9-11, 2011 Honolulu, Hawaii
  • Occupy TPPA
    The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) is a mega-treaty across nine or more countries. If the negotiations succeed they will put a straightjacket on the policies and laws our government can adopt for the next century. Corporations will gain massive new powers in Australia. Help us stop the TPPA!
  • Rock against the TPP
    Join us for a nationwide uprising and concert tour to stop the biggest corporate power grab in history: the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
  • Stop TPP Action
    Japanese alliance website