Leaked EU Policy Papers Show TAFTA/TTIP's Huge Challenges — And Some Subtle Signals

Politics

from the harder-than-they-thought dept

After last Wednesday’s debate, the European Parliament passed a resolution on the subject of NSA surveillance, which included the following mild wrist-slap:

But instead of postponing the imminent TAFTA/TTIP negotations, as some MEPs had called for, it limited itself to the following rather feeble action:

And so the TAFTA/TTIP talks will go ahead as planned. We already knew roughly what will be discussed during those negotiations, but no details. That’s now changed, thanks to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy getting hold of the European Commission’s initial position papers on TAFTA/TTIP. These aren’t exactly top secret — the US side will receive a copy ahead of the first round of talks — but they wouldn’t normally have been released, and so they offer a unique opportunity to see the thinking here, at least from the EU side.

In essence, the 65-page document tries to flesh out the general idea of “promoting regulatory compatibility/convergence”, which is supposed to deliver all those benefits that TAFTA/TTIP advocates have been touting. But once you get down to the nitty-gritty, as revealed by the papers, things turn out to be rather more difficult. The biggest problem, noted by many commentators, is that there aren’t really many trade barriers that can be removed, because trade is already pretty free between the US and EU. That throws the emphasis on non-trade barriers — things like differing local standards that make it hard to sell the same product in both the US and EU.

But as the position paper makes clear, it’s going to be extremely challenging bringing these into line. In some areas, that’s because the approaches of the two sides are so different as to be totally incompatible. That’s the case for chemicals, for example, as the document itself admits:

The best that EU advisers can come up with is the idea of “Promoting alignment in classification and labelling of chemicals”, which is hardly going to generate billions of extra trade activity.

There’s more scope for compatibility in the area of pharmaceuticals, but even here among the relatively few options are things like “allowing the exchange of confidential information and trade secret information between EU Member States/EU institutions and FDA.” Of course, that could be achieved more easily by making all key health and safety data for drugs freely available, as the AllTrials campaign is seeking to bring about.

The really revealing section concerns “SPS” — “sanitary and phytosanitary” issues. Behind that rather mysterious name lies a huge range of economic activity, including agriculture and food. And that, of course, means GM organisms — already flagged up as one of the key areas that is likely to be problematic. That’s because former USTR Ron Kirk stated quite bluntly:

But in Europe, GMOs are often regarded as “Frankenfood”, which is probably why the European Commission was careful to insist in its Q&A on the negotiations:

However, the policy paper does contain a few hints about how that apparent contradiction might be resolved, such as the following:

“Based on science” sounds reasonable, but it is actually the key concept that US has been using in order to export its food standards to the world. Here, for example, is the US 2013 Report on Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Barriers to Trade:

The inclusion of this phrase in the European Commission’s position paper looks like a signal to the US side that it will cave on GM foods if the “based on science” argument is invoked as a justification — after all, no reasonable person could be against science, could they? That readiness to capitulate seems to be confirmed by another carefully-chosen phrase later on, in a section headed “Marking and labelling” where we read:

Again, that sounds pretty innocent, until you compare it with the following statements made by Monsanto. The first comes during its campaign against dairies that labelled their products as free from the genetically-engineered recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST) hormone when it claimed that:

More recently, during the heated battle in California to label foods that contained GM ingredients (which was defeated by massive lobbying from GM producers), Monsanto wrote:

“Misleading” here actually means “telling people the facts about what their food contains”, and the appearance of this particular phrase in the EU document suggests that the European Commission is willing to allow companies like Monsanto to use the same loaded term to fight GM labelling in Europe too once TAFTA/TTIP comes into force. Presumably this will be offered as a concession in return for other items that are more important to the Commission than preserving European citizens’ right to know what is in their food.

Aside from these subtle signals, the other striking element in the document is the constant insistence on transparency, as here, for example:

For negotiations that are taking place behind closed doors, with no chance for citizens to follow what’s going on, or to offer input, that’s deeply ironic, of course. We’re fortunate that there are civic-minded people with access to TAFTA/TTIP documents who are prepared to leak them so that we can see some of what is going on. Let’s hope the example of Ed Snowden inspires more such leaks, since there seems precious little hope of the EU or US publishing those documents, or treating the 800 million-strong public they purport to represent with anything but arrogance and contempt in this regard.

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Filed Under: eu, tafta, ttip