Public Citizen analyzes the new Obama 2014 National Trade Estimate Report, in which the US Trade Rep demands that: Japan abolish its privacy rules and its requirement that food be labelled with its ingredients; Canada abolish its rules limited pharmaceutical patents; Malaysia get rid of its tariffs on pork and booze; Mexico nuke its junk food taxes, and more. It's great reading, and leaves little room for doubt about the neoliberal future, in which anything that's bad for corporate profits — even if it's good for society or reflects national values — is killed in the name of free trade.
The policies of other TPP nations criticized by the 384-page USTR report include New Zealand's popular health programs to control medicine costs, an Australian law to prevent the offshoring of consumers' private health data, Japan's pricing system that reduces the cost of medical devices, Vietnam's post-crisis regulations requiring banks to hold adequate capital, Peru's policies favoring generic versions of expensive biologic medicines, Canada's patent standards requiring that a medicine's utility should be demonstrated to obtain monopoly patent rights, and Mexico's "sugary beverage tax" and "junk food tax…"
The Obama administration report calls for some TPP nations to adopt copyright enforcement measures akin to those proposed under the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which was defeated in the U.S. Congress. For example, the report notes that the Obama administration "has also urged Chile … to amend its Internet service provider liability regime to permit effective action against any act of infringement of copyright and related rights." The report also criticizes data privacy policies, describing Canadian privacy rules as too "restrictive" and Japan's Privacy Act as "unnecessarily burdensome…"
The report takes issue with Malaysia's "extremely high effective tariff rates" on alcohol and its strict licensing policy for the importation of pork – strange "barriers" to highlight in a country where three out of every five people are Muslim. Malaysia's halal standards for meat have also been targeted as a "barrier" in a companion USTR report on Technical Barriers to Trade (published in 2013, the most recent edition available). USTR is concerned that Malaysia requires "slaughter plants to maintain dedicated halal production facilities and ensure segregated storage and transportation facilities for halal and non-halal products." Instead, the report suggests that the government should conform its notions of Islamic meat-processing requirements to those established by Codex Alimentarius, an international food standards body at which multinational food corporations play a central role…
The report expresses disapproval of Japan's food labeling policy, which "mandates that all ingredients and food additives be listed by name along with content percentages, and include a description of the manufacturing process." In a time when consumers are demanding ever more information about the products they consume, USTR complains that Japan's progressive labeling policy is "burdensome" and "risks the release of proprietary information to competitors."
(via Techdirt)
(Image: FREE TRADE 2006, Christopher Dombres, CC-BY)
