TTIP stands for Transatlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership. TTIP is not to be confused with TPP, which is the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, involving 12 countries including the US, Australia and Brunei, and
which, like TTIP, is still under negotiation. There is also Ceta, which stands
for Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement. It is like TTIP but for Canada
and Europe. Ceta is due to be ratified by the European parliament later this
year.
Last month, the European parliament voted to allow the
European commission to continue negotiations with the United States to create
the world’s largest free-trade zone, which is what TTIP is supposedly all
about. Nafta, the North American Free Trade Agreement was established in 1994
and proponents of TTIP think it demonstrates the kind of inspiring benefits and
harmonisation of standards that might result.
US ambassador to the EU Anthony L Gardner argues that would
“provide an economic equivalent to Nato” that would settle “the rules of world
trade before others do it for us”. Instead of being dependent on Russian gas
and oil, then, as a result of TTIP, the EU might become dependent on lovely
American and Canadian gas and oil. That’s one reason behind the EU’s call for a
dedicated chapter in TTIP on energy and raw materials. Instead of Russia
isolating the EU, the EU could isolate Russia.
Jeronim Capaldo of the Global Development and Environment
Institute at Tufts University argues that the commission’s econometric
modelling is jejune and that, in fact, TTIP will clobber Europeans. Capaldo
predicts 600,000 European job losses as a result of TTIP, a net fall in EU
exports, declining GDPs for EU member states and a fall in Europeans’ personal
income. Whereas, the European commission estimates that, by 2027, TTIP could
boost the size of the EU economy by £94bn or 0.5% of GDP.
One worry is that the main goal of TTIP is to remove EU
regulations that stop its citizens being poisoned, killed or subject to rampant
pollution so that more profits can be made by corporations on both sides of the
Atlantic. If TTIP involves, as the EU hopes, a commitment that would guarantee
automatic licences for all future US crude oil and gas exports to Europe, that
would result in a boom in US fracking to keep Europeans powered with shale gas,
not to mention greater exploitation of oil from Canadian tar sands. Such
developments, argue critics, would undermine not just the EU’s fuel quality
directive but ruin what is left of the planet worth ruining.
Or consider food regulations. While the EU has a “farm to
fork” strategy, for instance, regulating each link in the food chain, Americans
pump their cattle and pigs with growth-promoting hormones banned in the EU. As
a result, most US beef can’t be sold in the EU. Americans use 82 pesticides
banned in the EU. They wash their chicken in chlorinated water to kill
bacteria. Ninety per cent of their soya, cotton and corn is genetically
modified, while the EU allows member states to ban GM production. France, for
instance, has banned GM
One aspect of TTIP is ISDS, which stands for “investor-state
dispute settlement”. This procedure would allow companies to sue foreign
governments over claims of unfair treatment and to be entitled to compensation.
Similar provisions in other treaties have allowed, for example, tobacco
conglomerate Philip Morris to sue Uruguay and Australia for enacting
anti-smoking legislation, and a Swedish energy company to take legal action
against Germany for phasing out nuclear power. ISDS provisions undermine the
power of national governments to act in the interests of their citizens.
According to John Hilary, the executive director of War on Want, leaked
documents show that medical and health services, social services, education,
post, finance, telecommunications, transport, energy, water, environmental and
cultural services are all on the table in TTIP, meaning that American
corporations may have full access to them. In the UK, there are fears that ISDS
could threaten the NHS because it might allow private firms running hospital
services to sue the government if it chose to return the services to the public
sector.
MEPs are also worried that TTIP might undermine EU data
protection laws, and that’s why they have called for an “unambiguous, horizontal,
self-standing provision” in it to guarantee citizens’ right to privacy.
The government of Romania found itself facing a massive lawsuit from a corporate mining giant in a secret "court". There's nothing about the case that makes any sense – the corporation has said it may seek up to $4 billion in "compensation", which is half of Romania’s annual public healthcare budget.
ReplyDeleteGabriel Resources originally wanted to develop an enormous gold mine that would involve flattening four mountain tops. There were fears that this would would leave behind a behind a toxic waste lake containing dammed water and cyanide. But in 2014 a critical environmental document that was required for the project to go-ahead was annulled in a Romanian court. In the face of mass protests inside and outside the country, Romania’s parliament decided not to push through a law that would have allowed the project to continue. Gabriel Resources has submitted a request for arbitration at the World Bank, demanding compensation for all the gold and silver that they were unable to extract. The company is using a Jersey subsidiary to bring the case, so it can make use of a UK-Romania investment deal, even though it's based in Canada. The company claims they have spent nearly $500 million on the project, yet in an interview the company’s CEO claimed he was seeking up to $4 billion in "compensation".
This is exactly the kind of case which that TTIP would promote throughout Europe. Through something called the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism, foreign corporations get access to a secret arbitration system to sue governments for "damaging" their profits. These cases are taking place with an alarming frequency using a variety of existing trade deals, but TTIP would massively expand the possibility of this taking place. It would do this by allowing all US corporations to sue EU member states and all EU corporations to sue the US government.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/corporate-vampires-have-tried-to-suck-4-billion-out-of-romania-and-with-ttip-the-uk-could-be-next-10435975.html