Told you so

Sagano bamboo forest, Maui. Image via Nimbus Eco.

Well, maybe not exactly. I didn't tell you the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations were going to blow up in Maui and the chances of an agreement this year more or less ended, and how it's going to happen in presidential year 2016 I certainly don't know.

But I did tell you repeatedly that this wasn't what it's been presented by some self-denominated leftists as being, a vast corporate conspiracy to impose its will on the humans of the Pacific Rim, but a struggle among twelve governments, each seeking a different agenda, and there was no telling how it was going to turn out; and that interpreting the WikiLeaked documents without studying the brackets, as some kind of precise preview of what the final draft might contain, was an elementary error: they were documents of disagreement.

And it was inevitably not the eager demonstrators or Senator Warren that stopped it, or at any rate postponed it for a good long time, but that obscure and unradical institution the Australian Senate; or at least, as John Quiggin of Crooked Timber is explaining for anyone who wants to know, the Australian Senate is probably the biggest single obstacle:

US negotiators demanded an extension of existing restrictions on trade in pharmaceuticals that would greatly increase the cost of Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. Such a move had previously been pushed, and rejected by the Senate, in legislation to implement the Australia–US Free Trade Agreement in 2004. 

According to the New York Times, Australia’s trade minister Andrew Robb advised the American side that an agreement along the lines proposed would never be accepted by the Australian parliament – by which, of course, he meant the Senate. When the talks broke down over this and other issues, Robb made a virtue of necessity, saying that Australia had “walked away.”

That wasn't all, of course, as we learn from the Times report. The US negotiators bear most of the responsibility for the Pharma breakdown, for refusing to back down on this point on which they were opposed by all the other parties, not just our emoprog friends over here. The New Zealand team absolutely refused to give up on its insistence of forcing its cheap bland Egmont cheese down the throats of Canadian Cheddar lovers (sorry, Kiwis, you know I love you, but naming a cheese after whom?). Mexico, cherishing its NAFTA-created automobile industry, fought Japan's demands to flood the market with cars cheapened by the contributions of non-TPP workers. And so on. It was complicated.

But the worst thing in the list of things we were supposed to be afraid of, the US push on behalf of the pharmaceutical giants to give them a 12-year period of "data protection" for new drugs, essentially monopoly rights, was really never going to happen, because none of the other governments could live with it. And the thing that caused so much anxiety to Elizabeth Warren, the Investor-State Dispute Settlement or ISDS mechanism, as I've been at great pains to say, was never going to be any more of a problem than it has been for the 33 years it has already existed in various pacts among all the parties to the agreement and their various trading partners.

(Indeed, one more time, one ISDS lawsuit seemed like the best chance at defeating Big Pharma on this very issue: the suits prosecuted by the Canadian generic drugs company Apotex against the US government for protecting the monopoly profits of companies like Pfizer and Bristol Meyer Squibb. OMG, corporation suing the US government forcing it to accept its corporate will! Alas, as I keep saying, that's a red herring; governments almost never lose these cases, and the US government never does, and I now learn that the Apotex case missed what I believe is its last chance, and was dismissed by a NAFTA tribunal a year ago, and the Zoloft monopoly is safe from its wicked Canadian pirate attackers.)

And what else isn't going to happen, at least for the foreseeable future:

• Malaysia won't be forced by the TPP to get a grip on human trafficking in the country
• Vietnam won't be forced by the TPP to permit its workers to organize into effective unions
• Australia won't be forced by the TPP to wind down the most environmentally damaging coal industry in the world.

The odds that the TPP was going to accomplish these things were, of course, fairly slim. But not having a TPP is definitely not going to accomplish them; without it there are no odds at all. It's a little like the Iran nuclear agreement; the agreement may indeed not prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon at some point in the distant future (I'm convinced in this case that it will prevent it at least until the world situation is so different from what it is today that it won't be a relevant question at all), but rejecting the agreement will certainly not prevent it. The TPP is a much less clear choice, but in the case of environmental provisions in particular, something would be gained just by having these principles out there in international law and informing the language of future agreements. What we're losing is kind of a lot, as reported in the Times story:

The completed environmental chapter would cover illegal wildlife trafficking, forestry management, overfishing and marine protection, and it could prove to be a landmark, setting a new floor for all future multilateral accords.

“As centers of biodiversity, T.P.P. countries cover environmentally sensitive regions from tundra to island ecosystems, and from the world’s largest coral reefs to its largest rain forest,” reads a summary of the environment chapter, obtained by The New York Times. “T.P.P.’s Environment chapter addresses these challenges in detail.”...

Failure to comply would subject a signatory to the same government-to-government compliance procedures as any other issue covered by the trade agreement, potentially culminating in trade sanctions. United States negotiators hope that just the threat of economic sanctions will bolster relatively weak environmental ministries in countries like Peru, Malaysia and Vietnam.

Of course there are complaints that the agreement text spoke about "obligations" instead of "requirements", and that the US hasn't made much use of the trade agreements it already has (e.g. with Peru) to enforce compliance on these issues. I just want somebody to explain to me how no agreement at all does a better job.