economic crisis

In the face of sharply differing views, the chair Ambassador Vitalis said he will hold bilateral consultations with members in the coming days. However, it is unlikely that the chair's efforts will yield any result because of the continued diversionary tactics adopted by the US, the EU, and other industrialized countries, said an African trade envoy.

The TPP could limit the ability of the United States and other countries to follow Europe’s path, or to protect privacy by conditioning the movement of data across borders on compliance with the host country’s privacy rules for personal information. “The memory of misuse of data and National Security Agency surveillance is so fresh, and we should be careful about giving up control of our data,” said Kilic.

“Apparently, the TPP’s proponents resorted to such extreme secrecy during negotiations because the text shows that the TPP would offshore more American jobs, lower our wages, flood us with unsafe imported food and expose our laws to attack in foreign tribunals,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “When the administration says it used the TPP to renegotiate NAFTA, few expected that meant doubling down on the worst job-killing, wage-suppressing NAFTA terms, expanding limits on food safety and rolling back past reforms on environmental standards and access to affordable drugs.”

“Many in Congress said they would support the TPP only if, at a minimum, it included past reforms made to trade pact intellectual property rules affecting access to affordable medicines. But the TPP rolls back that past progress by requiring new marketing exclusivities and patent term extensions, and provides pharmaceutical firms with new monopoly rights for biotech drugs, including many new and forthcoming cancer treatments,” said Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program. “The terms in this final TPP text will contribute to preventable suffering and death abroad, and may constrain the reforms that Congress can consider to reduce Americans’ medicine prices at home.”

The TPP Intellectual Property Chapter would roll back the “May 2007” reforms for access to medicines. The TPP Environment Chapter would roll back the “May 2007” reforms by eliminating most of the seven Multilateral Environmental Agreements that past pacts have enforced. The TPP Investment Chapter would expand the scope of policies that can be challenged and the basis for such challenges, including for the first time ever allowing investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) enforcement of World Trade Organization intellectual property terms and new challenges to financial regulations.

The HKMD reads: "We agree to ensure the parallel elimination of all forms of export subsidies and disciplines on all export measures with equivalent effect to be completed by the end of 2013. This will be achieved in a progressive and parallel manner, to be specified in the modalities, so that a substantial part is realized by the end of the first half of the implementation period. We note emerging convergence on some elements of disciplines with respect to export credits, export credit guarantees or insurance programmes with repayment periods of 180 days and below. We agree that such programmes should be self-financing, reflecting market consistency, and that the period should be of a sufficiently short duration so as not to effectively circumvent real commercially- oriented discipline."

In sharp contrast to the joint proposal, the US maintained that the deadline for phasing out export subsidies must remain the same for both industrialized and developing countries. Under Article 9.4 of the Agreement on Agriculture, the developing countries are provided a longer duration as part of special and differential treatment flexibility. But the US wants to deny that flexibility and by suggesting the same time period for everyone, the US is disregarding the existing WTO provisions and the ministerial mandates, developing country agriculture negotiators maintained.

In a nutshell, the developed countries have resorted to an unprecedented form of cherry-picking to suit their interests by altering the existing ministerial decisions and mandates underpinning the four elements in the export competition pillar. But the same developed countries along with some developing country allies have launched a war-like effort to deny minimal credible developmental outcomes such as the permanent solution for public stockholding programs for food security and the special safeguard mechanism for developing countries, trade envoys argued.

Developing countries are also fighting to be permitted by WTO rules to invest in their own agricultural production and strengthen domestic food security programs that are currently permitted for rich but not developing countries, not even for Least Developed Countries (LDCs).

it seems that developed countries never intended to deliver on those development and agricultural reform promises, and have spent the last 14 years of the Doha Round sidelining development issues and instead working to expand the WTO’s neoliberal dictates on services, goods, agriculture and other issues. At the same time, they have taken their corporate wish lists to other forums, concluding the TPP and negotiating the TTIP, TiSA, ITA and EGA mentioned above.

This effort, which is the main fight in Nairobi, is even more pernicious because their goal is two-fold: abandon the development mandate, and then open up space to introduce all the new corporate issues they have been negotiating in the TPP, TTIP and other deals into the WTO, including investment, government procurement, disciplining state owned enterprises, and others. Many of these issues are not permitted to be on the agenda in the WTO while Doha is still being negotiated.

But blackmail is actually an understatement of what the troika is doing to Greece. It has become increasingly clear that it is trying to harm the Greek economy in order to increase pressure on the new Greek government to agree to its demands.

The first sign that this was the European authorities’ strategy came on Feb. 4 — just 10 days after the Syriza government was elected — when the ECB cut off the main source of financing for Greek banks. This move was clearly made in bad faith, since there was no bureaucratic or other reason to do this; it was more than three weeks before the deadline for the decision. Predictably, the cutoff spurred a huge outflow of capital from the Greek banking system, destabilizing the economy and sending financial markets plummeting. More intimidation followed, including a slightly veiled threat that emergency liquidity assistance, Greece’s last credit lifeline from the ECB, could also be cut. The European authorities appeared to be hoping that a shock-and-awe assault on the Greek economy would force the new government to immediately capitulate.

Remaining issues were to be negotiated by April 20, so that the final installment of IMF money — some 7.2 billion euros — could be released. One might assume that the Feb. 20 agreement would allow these negotiations to take place without European officials causing further immediate and unnecessary damage to the Greek economy. One would be wrong: A gun to the head of Syriza was not enough for these “benefactors.” They wanted fingers in a vise too. And they got it. The ECB refused to renew the Greek banks’ access to its main, cheapest source of credit that they had before the Jan. 25 elections. And it refused to lift the cap on the amount that Greek banks could lend to the Greek government — something that it did not do to the previous government. As a result, a serious cash flow problem has struck both the government and the banks. Because of the ECB’s credit squeeze, the government could soon find itself in a situation that the 2012 government faced when it delayed payments to hospitals and other contractors in order to make debt payments, and it could even face default at the end of April.