The Stealth Trade Agreement That Could Super-Size Industrial Agriculture
The “finish line is in sight” for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would likely send a generation of forward-thinking agrarian reform straight down the drain.
In the waning days of his presidential tenure George W. Bush opened negotiations with 12 nations, most of them from the Pacific Rim, over an expansive trade agreement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Very few people at the time took notice.
Since then, episodic talks have occurred in relative secrecy (it’s often characterized as “the largest trade agreement you’ve never heard of”), with occasional WikiLeaks piquing media curiosity. But TPP crept out of hiding last month when, facing a freshly Republicanized congress, Obama gave it a favorable nod in his State of the Union address. A few days later, the New Zealand trade minister Tim Groser told the Washington Post that “The finish line is in sight.”
As with any global trade agreement, there will be winners and losers. The 600 United States corporations with representatives involved in TPP negotiations suggest that the outcome will please Wall Street. Conversely, as Robert Reich explains, “the largest trade deal in history” could “be a disaster” for American wage earners and middle-class consumers, as the agreement would almost certainly weaken domestic regulatory mechanisms bearing on the environment, working conditions, and product safety.
Local options will revert to a status that reformers have been working for two decades to transcend: they will become nothing more than expensive, value-added options for the elite. It’s economics.
http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/the-stealth-trade-agreement-that-could-super-size-industrial-agriculture
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