The
United States is negotiating a NAFTA-style trade deal that should be alarming
to consumers. This deserves more news
coverage. It threatens to undermine our own laws and increase the opportunity
for corporate takeovers of public resources in the US and abroad. The worst
part? These negotiations are taking place behind closed doors.
This controversial
agreement is called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). It’s comprised of the
United States plus 11 other nations that border the Pacific Ocean. The TPP
would boost liquefied natural gas exports and food imports. This increases the
real dangers posed by reckless fracking for natural gas and the growth of
imported food from several countries whose safety standards fall far short of
our own.
The TPP could become
the biggest corporate power grab in U.S. history. This deal would establish a
regime under which corporations would acquire an equal status to countries,
allowing them to take legal action against governments both at the national and
local levels. With this power,
multinational corporations — especially energy companies — could overturn laws
enacted to protect the public and the environment if they were to deem that
those protections violated the profit-based terms of this trade agreement.
The United States
currently has enough challenges plaguing our food system, with many of our
would-be TPP partners shipping unsafe food even without these so-called
free-trade agreements. Seafood imports alone have been particularly troubling.
Much of the seafood we import is farm-raised using antibiotics and hormones
that are illegal in our own country, and a mere 2 percent of those imports are
actually inspected by the FDA.
The TPP would
encourage increasing the amount of seafood we take in without requiring the
trading partners to ban the use of illegal chemicals. This could also hurt the American consumers
through the expansion of the oil and gas industry, as it tries to increase its
land use at home to frack more gas for export to our new TPP partners.
This pact could
quickly undermine local, state, and even federal laws that protect public
health and the environment. Many localities have recently passed laws to ban
fracking. Unfortunately, a lot of the companies that are pursuing hydraulic
fracturing in the U.S. are either foreign-owned or have foreign investors.
The TPP would
potentially give companies the power to sue local governments, granting them
their own permission to exploit natural resources and undermine local laws.
Treaties like the TPP
undermine important efforts by grassroots movements and governments to protect
people and the environment against the dangers of infecting our food system
with increased use of antibiotics and hormones or the risks associated with
fracking for natural gas.
Protests against this
trade accord have already gotten started in other countries, including Japan
and Malaysia, as concerns grow over its expected negative effects. The bottom
line is that TPP will bring little, if any, benefit to small-scale growers and
producers.
As negotiations near
completion, it’s critical that we let our members of Congress know that we
don’t support this kind of corporate power grab. President Barack Obama is
asking Congress to grant “fast-track” authority, allowing him to negotiate the
TPP and other trade deals without otherwise requisite congressional oversight.
We must stop that from happening.
Undermining laws that
U.S. citizens voted to put in place isn’t the American way.
Wenonah Hauter is
the executive director of the consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch
This
work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/08/22-3
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