TPP Says Food Health Policies Must Be 'Science-Based,' Except When That Would Harm Profits
from the heads-I-win,-tails-you-lose dept...
Glyn Moody | TechDirt.com | Nov 17th 2015
The good news is that we finally have the complete text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. The bad news is that it runs to 6,194 pages, not including dozens of "related instruments" and "side chapters." There is no way that anybody could read through and fully understand the implications of all of that -- certainly not before it comes to a vote next year. But luckily, that's not necessary. Gone are the days when a single commentator would be expected to offer profound insights of a treaty's entire text. Instead, in our Internet-based world, it's very easy to do things in a highly-distributed fashion, parcelling out pieces of the task to many topic experts who carry out deep analysis in parallel.
One such source of expertise is the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, which has recently produced an analysis of TPP's "Sanitary and Phytosanitary" (SPS) chapter dealing with key issues such as food safety, and animal and plant health in agricultural trade. It's well-worth reading for its detailed comments on this section, but there are two main points that it makes. First, it notes a trick that has been used in the SPS chapter:
Growth hormones, food and agricultural nanotechnology, endocrine disrupting chemicals, antimicrobial resistance to anti-biotics, plant synthetic biology and so many others. Nothing about them -- among other controversial food safety, and animal, plant and environmental health issues or technologies -- appears in the SPS chapter. Instead, the chapter describes administrative procedures and consultative arrangements for resolving SPS "issues" insofar as they might impede agricultural trade.
Here's what happened to those key areas:
The [TPP] negotiators decided to locate provisions on "Trade in Products of Modern Biotechnology" for agricultural trade (Article 2.29) in Chapter 2, "National Treatment and Market Access for Goods," apparently believing that "modern biotechnology" does not pose SPS issues about which there might be controversy.
That is, the TPP text tries to sidestep all the heated controversies over the possible safety issues of modern biotechnology by omitting them completely from the chapter dealing with this aspect. The other discovery made by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy concerns a requirement to use "science-based" approaches when TPP countries establish their food safety rules:..snip
...In other words, TPP requires decisions on food safety and animal welfare to be "science"-based, where "science" includes unpublished studies carried out by companies, except when the science shows unequivocally that more stringent measures should be taken to protect health. In that case, countries are allowed to put profits before people, and to ignore the facts completely....snip
MORE: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151114/03255332817/tpp-says-food-health-policies-must-be-science-based-except-when-that-would-harm-profits.shtml
The TPP SPS chapter: not a “model for the rest of the world”
Dr. Steve Suppan
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
Published November 12, 2015
Minneapolis, November 12, 2015 — Proponents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement, and particularly the White House, have insisted that the TPP is a “high standards” agreement. The Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) “measures” affecting food safety and animal and plant health of agricultural trade are part of these “high standards.” Indeed, the TPP and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) are characterized as a “model for the rest of the world” by U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman.1 Far beyond any changes in tariffs, the most important U.S. export in the TPP is the making and enforcement of rules by which all TPP members, and any other countries that wish to export to the United States, must abide.
If the U.S. regulatory system and its scientific underpinnings had not been captured by the regulated industries,2 it might be credible to claim that repeating the mantra of “high standards” might help lead to improvements in public and environmental health and worker safety. TPP proponent support for Congressional regulatory “reform” and lawsuits for “regulatory overreach”3 indicates to us that what is being exported is a framework for regulatory capture that will be legitimated by reference to binding trade commitments and, in the case of the TPP SPS chapter, by “science.”
The TPP chapter on SPS measures is a mere 18 pages of the total 6,194...snip
http://www.iatp.org/documents/the-tpp-sps-chapter-not-a-“model-for-the-rest-of-the-world”
TPP Fine Print: Biotech Seed Companies Win Again
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
After six years of secret negotiations, the dozen countries that make up the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) have finally made the text public. The full implications of the broad-reaching, 30 chapter, 5000-plus page deal will be analyzed intensely in the coming months leading up to a U.S. Congressional up or down vote. Big concerns about the deal’s impact on public health, workers, the environment and the legal rights of corporations are already being raised. A close look at the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) chapter shows how just a few lines in TPP can turn into a big win for an industry—in this case, the biotech seed industry...
http://www.iatp.org/blog/201511/tpp-fine-print-biotech-seed-companies-win-again
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