New Zealand Not For Sale

TPP – 21st century agreement or 19th century?

admin — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 04:24:51 +0000

The following article appeared slightly edited in the Press on 16 June 2010, p.A21.

By Bill Rosenberg, Policy Director/Economist at the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions Te Kauae Kaimahi

A second round of negotiations towards the Transpacific Partnership Trade Agreement (TPPTA) will open next week in San Francisco. New Zealand is one of eight parties along with the US, Australia, Singapore, Chile, Peru, Brunei and Vietnam, and others may join.

This is much more than a trade agreement. It will reach into medicine prices, our ability to regulate important services such as finance, telecommunications, and education, our right to control foreign investment, our competition rules, rights to copy music and other digital media, the international trade effects of combating climate change, how local and central government can use their buying power for economic development purposes, and much more.

The Obama administration has put significant emphasis on this agreement, and has stated it wants it to “set the standard for 21st-century trade agreements”. It wants it expanded to include China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and other major Pacific economies.

In New Zealand it is sold as opening the US market to our agricultural produce, despite well engraved writing on the wall that any additional access will be bitterly fought, and if it comes will be at a glacial pace. By the time additional access is a reality, producers from many other countries would be competing for the same market.

This emphasis on opening markets with inadequate consideration as to the domestic effects of such agreements in weakening our ability to shape our own society and economy is distinctly 19th rather than 21st century. The globalisation of the 19th century ended with the First World War. The globalisation since the 1980s produced lower growth rates and repeated financial crises.

Prominent Harvard economist Dani Rodrik says he has an “impossibility theorem” for the global economy: “democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full”.

Our trade and investment agreements have ignored this incompatibility in favour of increasingly intense global economic integration, resulting in the wilting of our national sovereignty – our ability to make rules that would assist our development. Our democracy has weakened as a result: we still elect governments, but they are increasingly powerless to change the rules.

So what might a truly 21st century agreement look like – one which learns the lessons of the past?

First, open up the process of negotiation. This agreement will be more important than much of the legislation that goes through Parliament, yet it is negotiated behind closed doors with no opportunity for public scrutiny of proposals until the deal is signed, when it is too late. Let the citizens of the eight nations see the negotiating texts as they develop, and open them to debate.

Learn the lessons of the global financial crisis. It grew from high risk financial practices, and was spread rapidly round the world due to the absence of international financial regulation. It’s time to build new agreements in which nations cooperate in managing international financial movements, tax international financial transactions and regulate financial practices which are a danger to the health and safety of our economies. Instead, the financial rules being proposed give banks and other financial corporations the right to sell risky products, increasing international borrowing and trade risky instruments overseas with only limited protection for our financial system and economy.

“21st century” agreements should respect people’s need for affordable health care, and to organise their health services the way they choose. Instead, the vital work Pharmac does to force down monopolist prices charged for medicines is under attack from big US pharmaceutical corporations who want to use the TPPTA agreement to allow them to charge whatever the market will bear.

Many New Zealanders have been concerned at the control of strategic assets and land by overseas interests. A forward-looking international agreement should enhance our ability to select the investment we think is best for our needs. Instead the US has made clear its corporations dislike even our feeble foreign investment rules, and want the right to sue the government for damages before secretive international panels.

Such disputes have led to the award of hundreds of millions of dollars against governments which took action to protect the environment or to reverse privatisations which went wrong. In a current case, tobacco multinational, Philip Morris, is suing the Uruguay government to prevent it taking stronger anti-smoking measures.

International agreements have for decades been a recognised way to improve the rights of people at work. This one should be no exception.

If the TPPTA is genuinely there to improve people’s wellbeing it will ensure that core international labour rights conventions are just as enforceable as trade access and bad labour practices are not used as silent trade subsidies. Instead previous agreements have sidelined labour rights, while workers lose from the endless restructuring forced by globalisation, many seeing their high paid skilled job being replaced by a low paid, insecure one.

Similarly, international agreements are essential to protect our environment: many environmental threats require global solutions. Climate change is one, and controls on emissions can be undermined by trade with countries which have lower standards. The TPPTA should allow us to ensure our environment and our contribution to avoiding climate change are not undermined by trade. But the TPPTA countries all have very different approaches – in climate change, some have as yet done nothing. Protecting the environment should be an enforceable part of any agreement.

For the first time, the peak union bodies of most of the countries involved are cooperating in order to act on their concerns at the likely direction of the TPPTA. They have issued a declaration outlining their concerns, which include the above and many more.

Will the TPPTA be truly a 21st century agreement – or just more of the same?

New website launched to promote debate on Trans Pacific partnership negotiations

admin — Mon, 31 May 2010 07:25:55 +0000

A new website, Trans-Pacific Partnership Digest, has been launched to provide a comprehensive data base of material on the negotiations for a Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement involving New Zealand and seven other countries (the US, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam).

The second round of negotiations will take place in San Francisco next week. The website resource is part of a larger research project to identify and critically evaluate the potential implications of the agreement. It is led by Professor Jane Kelsey and has been supported by a grant from the School of Law at the University of Auckland.

Whatever one¹s views about the TPP, there has been far too little informed public debate about the rationale, potential content and ramifications, said Professor Kelsey.

This website aims to make information and opinion from all perspectives easily accessible to politicians, journalists, academics and students, activists, community groups, the business sector and interested people generally, and to stimulate critical debate.

The Digest is located at http://p4tpp.dyndns.org/

Thinking the Unthinkable: Could America Repeal NAFTA?

admin — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 01:51:12 +0000

Four congressmen have now moved a bill to repeal NAFTA. Superficially, this means little, as passage of this bill is unlikely in the near future. But more fundamentally, it means a lot because, unbeknownst to most Americans inside and outside the Washington Beltway, free trade is inexorably losing its base of support on Capitol Hill.

This means, for a start, that President Obama’s recent brave-faced pledge to move forward with his proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (interestingly, the dread phrase “free trade agreement” has been carefully left out of the name) is quite likely dead on arrival. Obama himself may know this and may have staged this gesture simply to placate foreign nations and domestic corporate interests.

Read full article at:

http://www.truthout.org/thinking-unthinkable-could-america-repeal-nafta58717

Chinese Buy Up of Dairy Farms: Get Used To It.

admin — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 01:53:09 +0000

This Is What A “Free” Trade Agreement Looks Like.

The most unbelievably naïve reaction to the news that a mysterious Chinese company is hoping to buy up to $1.5 billion worth of dairy farms came from Federated Farmers, which said that this is an “unintended consequence” of the NZ/China Free Trade Agreement.

Pull the other one.

There’s nothing unintended about this consequence, this is how “free” trade agreements are supposed to work.

They all come with embedded investment agreements which protect the rights of investors from the countries which are party to the Agreement, and those foreign investors’ rights are backed up by the force of legal sanction.

For example, the NZ/China FTA includes a provision that NZ cannot make or amend laws (without China’s permission) that “discriminate” against Chinese investors. So this is the outcome of what our brilliant politicians (both Labour and National) have signed us up to.

And this is only chickenfeed compared to what will happen if we keep up this mad headlong rush into an FTA with the US via the new Trans-Pacific Partnership (negotiations started this month).

Dairying is the white gold of NZ agriculture at present, and it would be thrown wide open to the predations of the massive agribusiness transnational corporations that dominate US agriculture.

And it gets worse – the politically very well connected US dairy lobby has already made it very clear that it will fight, tooth and nail, Fonterra’s access to the US market. To quote Bernard Hickey (NZ Herald, 23/3/10, “Why bother with a US FTA?”): “Get the picture? These guys really want to use the Trans-Pacific Partnership to shut out Fonterra from America…These FTAs are never about free trade from an American point of view. They are about creating another opportunity to strong-arm smaller countries into granting trade concessions to large American businesses”.

CAFCA could not have said that better ourselves.

So, cow cockies, be very careful what you wish for, as you join the lemmings of politics and their media cheerleaders charging towards the cliff of a US FTA (the “holy grail” to its proponents).

You may well end up with the worst of both worlds – locked out of the American market and finding your own dairy farms being bought up from under your feet and you being reduced to the position of Third World peasant farmers, waving goodbye to your product at the farm gate, while others make the money from it. Some holy grail.

As for the Chinese agribusiness buyup of dairy farms, the description of it by its own mouthpieces paints a perfect example of vertical integration, whereby the Chinese owners control every stage of the process from NZ paddock to the sales of the finished product in China.

They clip the ticket at every stage of the hermetically sealed process, with minimum benefit to NZ. It’s simply a new, Chinese, version of the British economic colonisation that dominated this country’s agriculture up until the 1970s.

So, instead of being a “farm for Britain”, NZ will be a milk cow for China. Apologists for foreign land ownership always say “they can’t take the land away”.

Why would they want to? It is much more profitable for them to leave it right here, and milk it (pun intended) for all it’s worth.

The media has already highlighted a number of aspects of this proposed massive buyup that look distinctly Mickey Mouse.

The Chinese company was actually a mining company which has changed its name to Natural Dairy (NZ) Holdings Ltd.

That sounds much more nice and “green”, doesn’t it? The company is registered in the Cayman Islands tax haven; it lists a street address in Hong Kong but has no phone number; and one of those involved in the deal is the subject of her own article in today’s Herald, again by Bernard Hickey, entitled “Should May Wang be allowed to buy NZ’s dairy farms?”.

The fact that the only confirmed part of the deal is that Natural Dairy is buying Alan Crafar’s fallen empire of dairy farms shows the dangers of monoculture in farming, of putting all one’s eggs into one basket, of the gold rush mentality (it used to be forestry, kiwifruit, goats, ostriches, Chathams Islands crayfish) and of a complete lack of any overall planning when it comes to the most vital productive sector of our farming industry.

Crafar is the perfect illustration of an era just past when every man and his dog got into dairying – in his case, the dog might have done a better job.

This is definitely not “foreign investment” – it’s a mortgagee sale.

And don’t expect our “oversight” authorities to do anything about it. Natural Dairy has already bought four farms and “neglected” to get approval from the Overseas Investment Office.

No worries to our heroic rubberstampers – it “rebuked” them (what exactly does that mean?) and gave them retrospective consent, a standard procedure for the OIO. Expect more of this stuff as the realities of an “open economy committed to foreign investment and free trade” become more glaringly obvious by the day.

Never mind Gerry Brownlee throwing the conservation estate open to foreign miners, the Chinese are already here to mine milk. And the Americans won’t be far behind if the Government (either National or Labour) persists in this childlike fixation with “free” trade.

Trans-Pacific Partnership: New Zealand jumping onto a sinking ship

admin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 05:49:14 +0000

Talks started in Melbourne today for the US, Australia, Peru and Vietnam to join an expanded Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (TPP, currently comprising NZ, Chile, Brunei, and Singapore, known as the P4 Agreement), with November 2011, when the US hosts APEC, as the target to seal the deal. This will be used as the backdoor means to secure a US/NZ Free Trade Agreement. Already the Americans have said that they see this as more than a mere free trade deal but as a vehicle for broader Asia/Pacific economic integration, which has enormous political implications. Alarm bells should be loudly sounding.

A free trade deal with the US would be catastrophic for any remaining economic sovereignty that New Zealand has. CAFCA says this not because we are “anti-American”. All such FTAs – such as with the existing P4 partners, or the more recent ones with Malaysia, the Gulf States and Hong Kong – pose the same threat to a greater or lesser degree. And our opposition to them is not because of “xenophobia” but for well founded grounds that they simply enmesh NZ more and more tightly in a cobweb of transnational corporate control.

So it’s a recipe for disaster to enter into an FTA with the biggest economy in the world, headed by a Government that aggressively pushes the interests of American Big Business (there is a seamless flow between the US Government and US Big Business, as is evidenced by the trillion dollar bailout of the mega-greedy financial sector, a textbook example of socialism for the rich).

And why would NZ want to jump onto a sinking ship? The US has big, big problems at the moment, with huge debt, record numbers of people losing their jobs and/or homes, company crashes, and a preoccupation with having to do something to fix its ramshackle social infrastructure (President Obama has postponed his Australian trip, which was to coincide with the start of these negotiations, to spend more time dealing with his campaign to reform the laughing stock that is the US health system). World trade dropped 12% in 2009, the biggest plunge since WW2, and globalisation is no longer flavour of the month – except with blinkered ideologues like Mike Moore, whom the Government has appointed as Ambassador to the US with an FTA as his self-proclaimed top priority. We’d be better off getting as far away as possible from this particular sinking ship.

A full blown US FTA will:

Remove any remaining “restrictions” on foreign investment, as the US regards NZ’s (purely token) oversight regime as “discriminating” against US transnational corporations, even though the Government has promised to further “liberalise” the Overseas Investment Act, a law which is in danger of being liberalised to death.

push up the price of medicines by potentially hundreds of millions of dollars a year by attacking Pharmac;

make access to digital recordings more expensive, and copying more restricted;

attack our GE controls and food labelling,

weaken our controls on food imports where they might carry diseases.

It is always presented as a means of getting NZ agricultural products into the US market. Ask Australian sugar cane growers how successful they were in getting their product into the US under the US/Australia FTA (Australia is one of the countries wishing to join the TPP, so that what they managed to protect from their FTA with the US is now also up for grabs). The Americans have a simple policy when it comes to “free trade” – do as they say, not as they do. In other words, they want the world’s markets opened up to their products, while keeping their own heavily subsidised agribusiness sector fully or heavily protected from outside competitors.

Both National and Labour myopically see a US FTA as being the Holy Grail of their adherence to the cargo cult of “free trade”. It’s actually a poisoned chalice and it will be New Zealand which will be poisoned by it.

This is also presented as NZ’s “reward” for being a loyal little satellite of the US, and taking a bigger role in the American war in Afghanistan. Older New Zealanders will remember the infamous “guns for butter” phrase of Sir Keith Holyoake, Prime Minister during our involvement in the Vietnam War. It means sending our soldiers to fight in US wars in order to, theoretically, gain trade access. Nothing much seems to have changed in the ensuing 40 years (except now it is “guns for milk”, as the Government’s trade policy is driven by a single minded focus on serving Fonterra’s interests). It is worth noting that the Waihopai spybase is NZ’s biggest contribution to each and any American war, much more so than any deployment of a few SAS troops to help prop up a horrendously corrupt Government of warlords and drug barons in Afghanistan.

People who kid themselves that “we” stand to gain from a Free Trade Agreement with the US would be wise to reflect on the rueful words of Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s Ambassador to the US in the runup to the 2003 US/UK invasion of Iraq. Speaking to the current public Inquiry into Britain’s part in that invasion and war: “Meyer expressed frustration that Britain was unable to gain much diplomatic leverage from its position as the US’ chief ally. Britain failed to persuade the US to liberalise trans-Atlantic air travel and, almost on the day when British commandoes joined the fighting in Afghanistan, the US imposed tariffs on imports of specialised British steel” (Press, 28/11/09). If this is the way that the US treats its “chief ally” when it comes to protecting its own trade and economic interests, how do you think little old NZ will get on?

For full details see the New Zealand Not For Sale Website www.nznotforsale.org

There you will find a wealth of information about just why this proposed Free Trade Agreement is such a bad thing.

We particularly recommend that you read Bill Rosenberg’s excellent article “Who Wins If We Get A Free Trade Deal With The US?”

Murray Horton

Secretary/Organiser

CAFCA

Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa

Box 2258, Christchurch, New Zealand

cafca@chch.planet.org.nz

http://www.cafca.org.nz

Hillary Clinton comes bearing a poisoned chalice for New Zealand

admin — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 02:31:48 +0000

Hillary Clinton’s visit this weekend will highlight the fact that negotiations will commence in March for the US to join an expanded Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (currently comprising NZ, Chile, Brunei, and Singapore, commonly known as the P4 Agreement), with 2011 as the target to seal the deal. This will be used as the backdoor means to secure a US/NZ Free Trade Agreement.

That would be catastrophic for any remaining economic sovereignty that New Zealand has. CAFCA says this not because we are “anti-American”. All such FTAs – such as with the existing P4 partners, or the more recent ones with Malaysia, the Gulf States and Hong Kong – pose the same threat to a greater or lesser degree. And our opposition to them is not because of “xenophobia” but for well founded grounds that they simply enmesh NZ more and more tightly in a cobweb of transnational corporate control.

A full blown US FTA will:

push up the price of medicines by potentially hundreds of millions of dollars a year by attacking Pharmac;

make access to digital recordings more expensive, and copying more restricted;

attack our GE controls and food labelling,

weaken our controls on food imports where they might carry diseases.

It is always presented as a means of getting NZ agricultural products into the US market. Ask Australian sugar cane growers how successful they were in getting their product into the US under the US/Australia FTA. The Americans have a simple policy when it comes to “free trade” – do as they say, not as they do. In other words, they want the world’s markets opened up to their products, while keeping their own heavily subsidised agribusiness sector fully or heavily protected from outside competitors.

The other side of the coin is that Clinton will be asking NZ to take a bigger role in the American war in Afghanistan. Older New Zealanders will remember the infamous “guns for butter” phrase of Sir Keith Holyoake, Prime Minister during our involvement in the Vietnam War. It means sending our soldiers to fight in US wars in order to, theoretically, gain trade access. Nothing much seems to have changed in the ensuing 40 years (except now it is “guns for milk”, as the Government’s trade policy is driven by a single minded focus on serving Fonterra’s interests).

Speaking to the current public Inquiry into Britain’s part in that invasion and war: “Meyer expressed frustration that Britain was unable to gain much diplomatic leverage from its position as the US’ chief ally. Britain failed to persuade the US to liberalise trans-Atlantic air travel and, almost on the day when British commandoes joined the fighting in Afghanistan, the US imposed tariffs on imports of specialised British steel” (Press, 28/11/09).

If this is the way that the US treats its “chief ally” when it comes to protecting its own trade and economic interests, how do you think little old NZ will get on?

For full details we particularly recommend that you read Bill Rosenberg’s excellent article “Who Wins If We Get A Free Trade Deal With The US?”

US/NZ Free Trade Agreement: Learn From Sad Experience Of US’ “Chief Ally”

admin — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 02:05:01 +0000

New Zealanders who kid themselves that “we” stand to gain from a Free Trade Agreement with the US would be wise to reflect on the rueful words of Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s Ambassador to the US in the runup to the US/UK invasion of Iraq.

Britain failed to persuade the US to liberalise trans-Atlantic air travel and, almost on the day when British commandoes joined the fighting in Afghanistan, the US imposed tariffs on imports of specialised British steel” (Press, 28/11/09). If this is the way that the US treats its “chief ally” when it comes to protecting its own trade and economic interests, how do you think little old NZ will get on?

Prime Minister John Key has already confirmed that NZ “must be prepared to make concessions”, saying that the US will have its own “shopping list… You can’t rule out Pharmac – it’s been on the list before. You can’t rule out issues of intellectual property and investment. All of those things will inevitably be part of the negotiations” (Press, 17/11/09; “Concessions needed for US deal, Key”).

You bet they will have a shopping list and that NZ will have to make concessions. Such an Agreement will (among other things):

Remove any remaining “restrictions” on foreign investment, as the US regards NZ’s (purely token) oversight regime as “discriminating” against US transnational corporations
push up the price of medicines by potentially hundreds of millions of dollars a year by attacking Pharmac;
make access to digital recordings more expensive, and copying more restricted;
attack our GE controls and food labelling,
weaken our controls on food imports where they might carry diseases.

We have been warned.

US free trade agreement a poisoned chalice for New Zealand

admin — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:21:20 +0000

The announcement that the US is ready to start negotiations in 2010 to join an expanded Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (currently comprising NZ, Chile, Brunei, and Singapore, commonly known as the P4 Agreement), with 2011 as the target to seal the deal, confirms that it will be used as the backdoor means to secure a US/NZ Free Trade Agreement.

A full blown US FTA will:

Remove any remaining “restrictions” on foreign investment, as the US regards NZ’s (purely token) oversight regime as “discriminating” against US transnational corporations, even though the Government has promised to further “liberalise” the Overseas Investment Act, a law which is in danger of being liberalised to death.
push up the price of medicines by potentially hundreds of millions of dollars a year by attacking Pharmac;
make access to digital recordings more expensive, and copying more restricted;
attack our GE controls and food labelling,
weaken our controls on food imports where they might carry diseases.

It is always presented as a means of getting NZ agricultural products into the US market. Ask Australian sugar cane growers how successful they were in getting their product into the USunder the US/Australia FTA. The Americans have a simple policy when it comes to “free trade” – do as they say, not as they do. In other words, they want the world’s markets opened up to their products, while keeping their own heavily subsidised agribusiness sector fully or heavily protected from outside competitors.

CTU Submission on P4 (December 2008)

admin — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 08:33:07 +0000

New Zealand Council of Trade Unions Submission on P4 agreement, 8 December 2008

Download PDF (152 Kb)

LIANZA submission on free trade copyright issues

admin — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 22:16:37 +0000

Download the submission on the trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement negotiations with the United States by LIANZA, the Library and Information Association of New Zealand Aotearoa / Te Rau Herenga o Aotearoa, on copyright issues

lianza_submission (PDF, 124 Kb)