Wikileaks Exposes NZ Government Duplicity on TPP

Monday, 20 December 2010, 10:14 am
Press Release: Professor Jane Kelsey
 

19 December 2010
For immediate release

Critic Calls for Honesty after Wikileaks Exposes Government Duplicity on TPP
“The government should stop its propaganda campaign to sell the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement to unsuspecting New Zealanders and tell them what it has told the United States government itself,” said Professor Jane Kelsey, author of a book of academic essays critical of the proposed deal.*

US diplomatic cables that reveal the views of New Zealand’s lead negotiator Mark Sinclair are included in Wikileaks documents analysed by Nicky Hager in today’s [19 Dec] Sunday Star-Times.
As recently as February this year, New Zealand’s own chief negotiator Mark Sinclair conceded to US officials there was little in a TPP Agreement for New Zealand. The only real “pay-off” was a remote long-term prospect to “put the squeeze” on Japan and Korea to stop protecting their agricultural markets.

Sinclair reportedly pointed to “a public perception that getting into the US will be an ‘El Dorado’ for New Zealand's commercial sector. However, the reality is different.’”
Professor Kelsey observed that this “false perception” has been scripted by the government itself.
“When our book was released, the Prime Minister and private sector cheerleaders peremptorily dismissed the same kind of criticisms that officials have voiced behind closed doors.”

“The cable confirmed that US firms have our GM regulations, restrictions on foreign ownership of land and mineral resources, and intellectual property laws, including Pharmac, squarely in their sights.”
A second set of cables from 2004 analysed by the New Zealand Herald show the US diplomatic post has been working with its pharmaceutical companies to undermine the world-leading Pharmac drug purchasing regime that makes medicines affordable to New Zealanders, claiming this would enhance New Zealanders’ access to health care.

The cable suggests the US drug industry helped foment the furore over Herceptin and Alzheimers medicines as part of campaign to “fire up pressure from below”.
“The cable confirms that ‘US Big Pharma’ will use a TPPA to target Pharmac and other intellectual property laws”, said Professor Kelsey.

“Equally worrying is the revelation that officials saw the extension of patent terms, which would increase medicine prices, as bargaining chips if the US agreement to negotiate FTA.”
“In the February 2010 discussion with US officials, negotiator Mark Sinclair talks about “managing” New Zealanders’ expectations from a TPPA.”

“That’s not good enough. It is time the government came clean to Kiwis that it sees no tangible gains from a deal and justify why it is continuing with negotiations that have potentially serious costs for our health system, consumer laws, ultimately for our sovereignty”, Professor Kelsey said.

ENDS
* No Ordinary Deal. Unmasking the Trans-Pacific Partnership Free Trade Agreement, Jane Kelsey, ed, Bridget Williams Books, 2010.

TPP: Open Letter to the Prime Ministers of Australia and NZ

Friday, 03 December 2010, 3:02 pm
Press Release: Professor Jane Kelsey and AFTINET
 
3 December 2010

Rt Hon Julia Gillard, Prime Minister of Australia
Rt Hon John Key, Prime Minister of New Zealand

Open Letter to the Prime Ministers of Australia and New Zealand
Dear Prime Ministers

The proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) has been branded a “free trade agreement” by its corporate and government proponents. In reality, the main function of the agreement would be to establish an array of new investor rights and privileges that could undermine vast swathes of important non-trade laws, policies and practices in the nine countries currently involved. These constraints would bind our governments into the indefinite future.

Perversely, the TPPA proposal is being sold as a new agreement for the 21st century. In fact, the US is effectively setting the terms for negotiations, based on a standard template that replicates the US North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) model.

We know from the experience in the US, Canada and Mexico that the NAFTA model eliminates the crucial policy space that our governments need to address the employment, climate, financial and energy crises that will dominate the next century. It not only establishes vast new investor rights to acquire land, natural resources, financial and other firms and operate them under deregulated terms - it also elevates private investors to equal status as sovereign government signatories to the agreement. Under the US Free Trade Agreement (FTA) model, foreign investors and corporations are empowered to privately enforce their new “trade” pact privileges by suing signatory governments in foreign World Bank and UN tribunals, seeking monetary compensation for government actions they consider to undermine their expected future profits.

If a TPPA follows that old investor-rights model, decisions on development of our economies, management of our natural resources and land, our access to medicines, cultural content, banking regulation, environment and labour laws, food labelling, tobacco control policies, and much more will be circumscribed from outside the country, with the threat of challenge by foreign firms in private international courts chilling critical innovations and potentially threatening some existing policies.
Trade agreements should focus on real trade. They should not provide a means for corporations to achieve policies and laws through a back door that bypasses the democratic processes of domestic parliaments.

Moreover, investment rules in an agreement for the 21st century should address the damaging by-products of the old model - climate change, food scarcity, financial instability, an employment crisis, natural resource exhaustion, indigenous dispossession and rampant inequality – and make the corporations and investors that are responsible for these crises accountable and liable.
In addition to establishing corporate and investor responsibilities, any future investment agreement must exclude the substantive rules and enforcement mechanism of past investor-rights agreements that make them unacceptable. These include:

Investor-state enforcement privileges that elevate individual investors and firms to equal status with our sovereign governments, empowering them to enforce a public treaty’s commercial provisions privately by demanding cash compensation from country’s taxpayers for government regulatory actions via lawsuits before international tribunals that lack public accountability, standard judicial ethics rules, and appeals processes.

The empowerment of secretive international tribunals at the UN and World Bank that supplant domestic courts and apply international agreements to undermine the validity of domestic laws and require our countries to compensate investors and corporations with our taxpayer funds. Arbitrators in those tribunals are not subject to any effective conflict of interest rules and crucial documents and proceedings are closed to the public and press.

Entitlement to prior consultation on proposed policies and regulations that guarantee foreign investors more input into domestic decisions than the country’s own citizens.

Vaguely worded provisions guaranteeing foreign investors a “minimum standard of treatment”, including “fair and equitable treatment,” that extend beyond guarantees of due process and confer preferential treatment on foreign firms relative to their domestic counterparts.

Corporate rights to compensation for regulatory costs in the guise of protection against “indirect” expropriation by regulations and other government actions that reduce the value of a foreign investment. The threat of massive damages awards can have a “chilling effect” on policymaking, with important policies being reversed or never being implemented. It is misleading to suggest that annexes and tweaks added to recent FTAs provide effective protection from these threats.

Far-reaching definitions of “investment” that must be provided with new protections and privileges under an FTA extend far beyond real property rights and other specific interests in property to include speculative financial instruments, natural resource concessions, procurement contracts and intellectual property rights, over which governments must retain effective regulatory authority.

Pre-establishment rights for investors that remove the host government’s right to review foreign investment proposals to ensure that they meet the public interest.

Constraints on capital controls and other financial regulatory tools that can minimise hot money flows and excessive concentration of financial investors, restrict the sale of risky financial products and services, and open prudential measures to investor and state challenge. Again, the misleadingly termed “prudential carve-out” does not provide effective protection for these measures.

The subsidiary loophole that allows corporations to bypass their domestic courts by using “trade” pacts and their foreign subsidiaries located in a FTA or Bilateral Investment Treaty partner nation to attack their domestic laws from outside the country.

We note that the US-Australia FTA does not contain the outrageous provision on investor-state disputes, and the Australian government remains opposed to its inclusion in any TPPA. We applaud that position as an important first step, and urge the government to adopt a similarly forward thinking position in relation to the other matters we have raised.

We also note that the New Zealand Prime Minister has described the inclusion of such powers in a TPPA as “far-fetched” and expects that New Zealand would support Australia’s position. Minister of Trade Tim Groser subsequently stated in Parliament that the government would carefully safeguard the sovereignty of New Zealand to entertain good public policy in accordance with the principles of open government. It is clear that the only way to achieve that outcome is not just to reject investor-state disputes procedures, but also to pursue an investment agreement that is premised on the principles outlined above.

Across the political spectrum in our countries, opposition is building to investor-rights agreements that threaten to lock us into policies and approaches that have proved a failure.
Our governments must re-think the dangerously outdated NAFTA-style approach to investment and genuinely engage with their citizens to develop a new model investment agreement that is genuinely fit for the 21st century.

Sincerely,

Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU)
New Zealand Council of Trade Unions (NZCTU)
Australian Catholic Social Justice Council (ACSJ)
Friends of the Earth, Australia (FOE)
Public Health Association of Australia (PHAA)
Public Health Association of New Zealand (PHA)
Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network (AFTINET)
Music Council of Australia (MCA)
Australian Education Union (AEU)
Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU)
Australian Nursing Federation (ANF)
Australian Writers Guild (AWG)
Australian Services Union (ASU)
Community and Public Sector Union - State Public Services Federation (CPSU - SPSF)
Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU)
Finance Sector Union (FSU)
Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA)
Finsec Union of New Zealand
Maritime Union of New Zealand (MUNZ)
National Distribution Union of New Zealand (NDU)
New Zealand Tertiary Education Union (TEU)
UNITE Union
New Zealand Society of Authors
Aid/Watch
Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA)
New Zealand Not for Sale
Catholics in Coalition for Peace and Justice (CCJP)
President-elect, Methodist Church of New Zealand John Roberts
Economic Reform Australia (ERA)
Edmund Rice Centre for Justice and Community Education
Franciscan Missionaries of Mary (F.M.M)
Nature Conservation Council New South Wales (NCCNSW)
Pacific Institute of Resource Management, NZ (PIRM)
Our Water Our Vote, New Zealand
Pacific Calling Partnership
Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC)
SEARCH Foundation
The Grail
The Alliance to Expose GATS
West Australian Regional Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends
WTO Watch Qld
Global Peace and Justice Auckland (GPJA)
Workers Institute for Scientific Socialist Education (WISSE)

ENDS

FTA Critic Told To "Get A Visa" To Go To Australia

Tuesday, 16 November 2010, 4:13 pm
Press Release: Professor Jane Kelsey

FTA Critic Told To "Get A Visa" To Go To Australia

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
16 November 2010


On Sunday evening (14 November), Professor Jane Kelsey was detained at immigration at Sydney airport for about an hour at the beginning of a tour to launch a new book on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. She was informed by a senior immigration official that she was not eligible for visa free entry to Australia on the grounds that she was not an ‘appropriate person’ under Australia’s 1994 immigration laws.

While eventually allowed to enter Australia on this occasion, Professor Kelsey was told she would need to apply formally for a visa for any future visits, and was advised to seek a waiver from the Australian High Commissioner.

The official relied on a Springbok tour conviction from the early 1980s, which he claimed had attracted a suspended prison sentence of one year and nine months. Despite claims by the official that ‘appropriate checks have been made’, no such sentence was ever imposed on Professor Kelsey or the others involved in the case. Indeed, the Court of Appeal overturned a binding-over order that would have prevented those involves from engaging in further political protest. Former Green MP Sue Bradford, who was also involved in the case, has confirmed that she has never had similar problems entering Australia.

Professor Kelsey describes this development as ‘totally bizarre’.

‘I am a constant visitor to Australia for professional and personal reasons – at least eight times in the past two years, including just one month ago for an academic conference on trade.’

‘I always tick the box about criminal convictions, which relate to the Springbok tour and Bastion Point in the early 1980s. They have the list on record at Australian immigration. Usually I wait 10 or at most 15 minutes and they wave me on. This twist came completely out of the blue.’

Professor Kelsey has expressed her concern to the Australian High Commissioner and sought clarification of her immigration status under Australian law, including whether she will be required to seek visa for future entry to Australia.

‘It is possible it is an ill-judged over-reach by super-officious immigration officials at Sydney.‘

‘However it is equally likely that my name has recently been flagged, presumably linked to my role in promoting critical debate on the TransPacific Partnership negotiations. Requiring me to apply for a visa each time I go to Australia would make it easier to monitor and restrict my movements. At the very least sends an intimidating message to me and to others.’

Last year Professor Kelsey raised concerns over the apparent surveillance by the SIS of her activities as a critic of neoliberalism and free trade agreements, which she argues are actually investor-rights agreements that impose severe constraints on New Zealand’s future policy choices and sovereignty.

‘This latest development seems to confirm that promoting informed and democratic debate on these secretly negotiated agreements is deemed a threat to national security. Everyone should be worried about the implications for academic freedom and informed debate in a democracy.’

- Press release from Professor Jane Kelsey.

ENDS

Now is not the time to be signing away NZ's sovereignty

Thursday April 2 2009

Media Release: Professor Jane Kelsey

Now not the time to be signing away NZ’s sovereignty

At a time when New Zealand needs the flexibility to respond to pressing domestic economic priorities, and with fresh questions being raised in Australia about the value of their free trade agreements, now was not the time to be signing away New Zealand’s economic sovereignty, Professor Jane Kelsey told a select committee this morning considering the ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand free trade agreement.

“The current crisis was largely generated, and was certainly fuelled, by light handed regulation of financial services operators. Now New Zealand is locking in the deregulation of financial services throughout South East Asia through this agreement.”

“While New Zealand may have reiterated its existing commitments under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), the ASEAN FTA has the potential to wreak havoc in East Asian countries that suffered a devastating financial meltdown just a decade ago.”

These agreements don’t come without a cost, and neighbouring Australia is now raising questions over the value of their free trade involvement, Jane Kelsey said.

In recently published analysis of Australian FTAs,* the Australian Parliamentary library found that despite the benefits being talked up, Australia’s FTAs have been followed by massively higher Australian trade deficits, and the anticipated gains for Australian exporters have fallen well short of estimates.

Professor Kelsey challenged the major parties to adopt a moratorium on further negotiations so their impacts on New Zealandcould be better understood.

“These FTAs are expansive and complex and bind the hands of future governments in ways that are poorly understood and often unanticipated. Yet the government has already signed the agreement, which renders the select committee process all but useless.”

“The implications of Free Trade Agreements are especially worrisome at a time of international economic crisis,” Jane Kelseysaid. “This is not the time to be signing agreements that tie the hands of governments and remove the flexibilities that are essential to respond to domestic priorities.”

* Australian paper: http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/BN/2008-09/AustFreeTradeAgreements.htm

Laban Lap Dog for Neo Liberalism in the Pacific

This was reported on Radio Australia today, I guess that makes Laban a lapdog for neo liberalism in the Pacific, SHAME.

Scoop: Laban to attend PI Forum Trade discussions

True to form, the sellable face of spreading neo liberalism throughout the Pacific is sadly yet again Winnie Laban. She also recently headed a delegation of Pacific Island Businesses to Guam, and with Condalezza Rice visiting Aotearoa soon, what ever the administration NZ is firmly locked into supporting American hegemony in the Pacific. Don't believe the hype that that slave labour settler grubbyment are spreading about Trade in the Pacific, ours cousins across the ocean have told us about NAFTA. Here Jane Kelsey lays out what the implications of PACER & PICTA will be on the peoples of the Pacific. Time to get busy people.

The picture that emerges is deeply disturbing. As one NZ government official confirmed with disarming frankness: when it comes to trade there is no ‘special relationship’ with the Pacific. Effectively, international trade strategy takes priority over the views of Pacific governments and the needs of Pacific peoples.

This is not just a power grab by Australia and NZ for control of the South Pacific. As a World Bank report spelt out in 2002, PACER aims to lock the Pacific Islands irrevocably into the neoliberal paradigm. The link to the Pacific Regional Economic
Partnership (REPA) negotiations with the EU is partly defensive. But PACER and Cotonou are also flip sides of the same coin. Both swap preferential agreements for reciprocal ones that guarantee more extensive market access without having to
make any additional concessions. Both promise sensitivity to the realities of poor, small and vulnerable Pacific Islands, while they treat them as pawns to advance their global strategic game plan. Both reach beyond the rapidly expanding ‘trade’ agenda of goods, services, investment, competition and procurement to advance the Washington Consensus policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, including labour market ‘flexibility’, fiscal austerity and privatisation of
state assets and services. The broader and deeper the liberalisation, the more ‘structural adjustment’ will be required.

The Pacific was viewed as an inherited millstone - but one they were determined to keep under their control. As the multilateral regimes began to falter and a scramble for regional and bilateral deals accompanied the revival of US imperialism, Australia and NZ focused on securing their own small sphere of influence. The desire to recolonise ‘their lake’ now dominates their economic, political and military relationship with their Pacific neighbours.

The report found the following, that the major impacts of globalization in the Pacific were, number one, rapid increase in extreme poverty; and number two, destabilization of governments. After decades of failed economic development and stagnant private investment, we see now the rapid rise of extreme poverty in the Pacific. 40% of the peoples of Vanuatu live in poverty. 48% in Samoa. Over 50% in Kiribati. “The Island of Hope” documented that the primary cause of poverty in the Pacific relates to globalization, and that this rise in poverty is interlinked with the adoption by national governments of liberal policies promoting investment and competition, and this has operated to the detriment of social services, including health, education, housing, and social welfare.

Native Hawaiian attorney, Mililani Trask, speaking at a forum sponsored by the International Forum on Globalization

Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Economic Globalization: A Celebration of Victories, Rights and Cultures

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Jane Kelsey Rallies Anti-APEC Gathering

Prof Jane Kelsey Rallies Anti-APEC Gathering in Sydney

# Scoop Audio: New Zealand academic Professor Jane Kelsey spoke to an anti-APEC rally in Sydney's Hyde Park on Friday. Prof. Kelsey said APEC's trade liberalisation agenda is causing families to become further impoverished in many developing world countries. She said the US-Australia plan to develop nuclear power generation technology as a means to solve the world's climate change problems was dangerous and self-serving.

http://img.scoop.co.nz/media/audio/0709/JaneKelseyAntiAPECRally70907.m3u

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0709/S00143.htm

Updates On Developments In The Pacific

Tuesday, 15 March 2005, 9:10 am
Article: Professor Jane Kelsey

Dr Jane Kelsey, Action, Research and Education Network of Aotearoa (ARENA/NZ), to the International Coordinating Network WTO Preparatory Meeting, Hong Kong, February 2005

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The South Pacific may seem a strange starting point for an input on the Hong Kong ministerial conference in December. It is about as far away from Geneva as you can get. But its situation shows how the WTO reaches the most remote parts of the world, including countries that are not and never will be WTO members.

The Pacific Islands lie east of Indonesia and north of Australia and New Zealand. They are small, remote and vulnerable to climatic disasters. Most of their people are subsistence farmers and fishers. Their governments depend on tariffs for between one third and half their revenue, supplemented by foreign aid and remittances. The small range of exports, and sources of wage work, centre on natural resources of fish, sugar, kava and minerals, as well as garments. These depend on trade preferences from former colonial powers of Britain, Australia, New Zealand, France and the US.

Despite this, the Pacific Islands are under pressure to immerse themselves in the global economy, to privatize, liberalise imports and remove restrictions on foreign investors, including ownership of land. That pressure comes from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, through Poverty Reduction Strategy Programmes (PRSPs) that invoke the Millennium Development Goals to justify foreign control of key services. It also comes from aid donors, mainly Australia, New Zealand and the European Union, who define good governance as implementation of the neoliberal agenda.

There is no way these Islands can compete in the global economy. Theories of ‘comparative advantage’ mean continued export of natural resources by foreign companies with no added value. Reducing tariffs means cutting government revenue and increasing dependence on a VAT. Yet Pacific Islands governments say they have no choice. Preferential access to their main markets is eroding because their former colonial benefactors are lowering their tariffs and signing free trade deals with other countries. The European Union has insisted that all the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries must negotiate reciprocal access for its goods under ‘economic partnership agreements’, which will also guarantee their transnationals rights in services, investment and intellectual property. Australia and New Zealand say anything the EU gets, they want too. Under Compacts of Free Association with Palau, the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia, the US will also receive the same treatment they negotiate with the EU. In the hope that a stepping stone approach will somehow make all this manageable, the Islands have opted for a free trade agreement among themselves (PICTA), starting with goods and soon to be extended to services. But even that is looking unmanageable.

Worse, all these arrangements have to be WTO compatible, even though only three of the 14 Pacific Islands states belong to the WTO. Because those they negotiate with are WTO members, WTO compatibility means those rules will govern their economic life even though most are not, and never will be, WTO members. This has led some governments to suggest that they should join, so they at least have a seat at the table. But the experience of those who are WTO members shows that is a delusion.

Three Islands (Fiji, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands) are founding members of the WTO. Since the first ministerial conference in Singapore in 1996 they have argued that the WTO needs to address the plight of small vulnerable economies. At every meeting the rhetoric of the Ministerial Declarations has recognised this; there is even now a small economies work programme. But it is going nowhere, because they simply don’t matter. Their desire for recognition even faces opposition from other countries in the South who fear a formal category would further ‘divide and rule’ – even though the shift of Brazil and India into the negotiating room of the Five Interested Parties last July seems likely to have a much more significant effect.

These three WTO Members have problems enough with existing rules. Under the Doha ‘Development’ Round they face demands for new commitments in services – including EC ‘requests’ that PNG and Solomon Islands remove restrictions on foreign ownership of land. NAMA negotiations on goods will impact on the sustainability, earnings and potential for adding value to their fisheries and forestry exports.

Fiji’s sugar exports will be drastically affected by the WTO panel finding against the EU. Renegotiation of the ACP countries Sugar Protocol with the EU will reduce the price that Fiji receives for sugar and may collapse the industry – which is the main wage employer in Fiji, along with garments. That would provoke an economic, social and political crisis. Meanwhile, the Europeans’ plan to bring subsidies for its own sugar producers within its Common Agriculture Policy could well see them continue if the proposals for so-called ‘box-shifting’ contained in the July framework on Agriculture are agreed to.

The potential for WTO membership to intensify existing economic, social and political instability in these Islands is enormous. Fiji has suffered two ethnically driven military coups in 1986 and 1999. The Solomon Islands is just emerging from a civil war. Papua New Guinea has chronic economic and law and order problems.

Recently I asked Fiji’s former Ambassador to Brussels, now the CEO of the Ministry Foreign Affairs and Trade, whether he would recommend that Fiji join the WTO if it wasn’t already a member. He thought for a while and said he probably would, so they had advance warnings of the tidal waves that were coming their way and could take defensive action, even though they couldn’t affect the decisions themselves.

Three other Pacific Islands are in the process of joining the WTO – Vanuatu, Samoa and Tonga. The first two are Least Developed Countries. The politics of accession are outrageous, far worse than the WTO’s Green Room and the bullying of existing members from the South. To join the WTO requires unanimous support from a Working Party. Any WTO member can join the Working Party and they have to be satisfied with what is being offered before a country can join. The major powers routinely demand WTO-plus commitments from some of the world’s poorest countries, as Cambodia has recently experienced. Vietnam and Lao are facing similar demands.

These concessions are used as leverage in accession negotiations with more economically important countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Russia – and previously China. The major powers also aim to create a critical mass in support of their various positions in the Doha round. So Australia and New Zealand as Cairns Group members routinely demand WTO-plus commitments on agricultural tariffs, export subsidies and emergency safeguards. The US makes equally outrageous demands on services. Few small countries have the skill base to assess the implications and are told they can’t join unless they agree. When accession is a debt conditionality, as it effectively was for Vanuatu in the later 1990s, they feel they have even less choice.

The experience of Vanuatu is especially significant. It completed this tortuous process and was supposed to be the first Least Developed Country to join the WTO, at the Doha ministerial meeting in 2001. Days before Doha the government backed off because the price was too high. Last year the government decided to reactivate the accession on the basis that Vanuatu was already facing requirements for WTO-compatibility through regional agreements and it would be better to negotiate accession on its own terms now than to have them dictated as another debt conditionality if Vanuatu faced a renewed economic crisis in the future. However, the government has asked the US to re-open its services schedule and allow it to withdraw foreign investment rights for health, education, audio-visual, environmental and retail and wholesale distribution. The US hasn’t replied – and the chances of it agreeing to create such a precedent are extremely remote. Vanuatu needs all the encouragement possible to stand firm and set an example for the few poor countries that still remain outside the WTO’s grasp.

But that is not the end of the story. In addition to the Doha Round/WTO accession, as members of the Africa, Caribbean and Pacific Group – the ACP - the Pacific Islands have just begun negotiations with the European Union for a regional ‘economic partnership agreement’ (EPA) under the Cotonou Agreement. ‘Partnership’ is the new buzz word, which is also being used to rehabilitate the World Bank agenda through the Poverty Reduction Strategy Programmes, and privatization and foreign control of key services through the Millennium Development Goals. It is the same old colonization in a new guise.

The EPAs will replace the preferential market access the Islands enjoy under the Lomé Convention, which has been critical for their sugar and canned tuna exports, with reciprocal rights for European products. The EPA is required to be WTO compatible - which the EC interprets to mean reciprocal trade in 90% of goods to be implemented in slightly more than 10 years.

The idea of a level playing field in goods between the EU and ACP countries is fanciful enough. But the Cotonou Agreement also includes the issues that the Europeans haven’t been able to get on the Doha agenda – notably competition and investment. It is ironic that the ACP fought so hard in Cancun to keep these ‘new issues’ off the table, but conceded much of that ground to the EU under Cotonou.

A further threat hangs over the Islands. Australia and New Zealand, their biggest export markets and main source of imports, bullied the Islands into signing the PACER agreement in 2002. Under PACER the Pacific Islands promised to negotiate a WTO-compatible economic integration agreement with Australia and New Zealand if they begin negotiations for a free trade agreement with another developed country, ie. the European Union. Such an agreement would devastate their revenue, their fledgling industrial and agricultural exports, food security and employment.

As with most poor countries, these negotiations pose huge issues of capacity. Fiji, which has the largest and most advanced bureaucracy, doesn’t have a trade lawyer on its team. Small islands are lucky to have one official to deal with this whole complex array of negotiations, with high turnover. Secrecy, lack of understanding and hostility of many government to trade unions, NGOs and other social activists means that local people are barely aware that this process is underway. Solidarity and empowerment is an urgent challenge.

In summary, the Pacific Islands are pawns in a game over which they have no control. Vanuatu’s decision to hold back from WTO membership, and based on that experience from signing up to PICTA and PACER, needs to be more widely known and built on.

Those of us whose governments are making these outrageous demands need to find ways to challenge their role in that process. This is not easy. Governments within the Asia/Pacific region that are rabid free traders have embarked on a rescue mission for the WTO and APEC through regional and bilateral agreements that are also designed to be WTO-plus. They justify this as meeting APEC’s ‘Bogor goal’ of free and open trade and investment by 2010 for the richer countries of the region plus volunteers (including Hong Kong China) and 2020 for the ‘developing countries’.

These agreements are designed to have the ‘demonstration effect’ that governments remain committed to neoliberal globalization. Often they do little more than lock in the neoliberal trade, investment, privatization and deregulation policies that recent governments have introduced, and prevent future governments from ‘backsliding’. For some governments, notably in Singapore and Chile, bilateral and regional agreements are also intended to create a ‘platform’ that will attract foreign investors to their whole region. Hong Kong performs a similar role for China.

There are broader foreign policy objectives as well. We know how the US in particular manipulates accession (yes to Iraq, no to Iran) in line with its imperialist agenda and insists on alignment of foreign and trade policy objectives in regional trade agreements with subordinate countries. Thankfully for us, it won’t negotiate with New Zealand so long as we maintain our anti-nuclear policy.

China is playing an interesting game. It was forced to make extensive commitments in its WTO accession. Yet it is now engaging in numerous free trade negotiations. Why? New Zealand came first because it was prepared to recognize China as a market economy – which set a vital precedent. That free trade agreement would merge with the bilateral investment treaties New Zealand already has with China and potentially Hong Kong. The effect on garment and other manufacturing in New Zealand has given rise to some China bashing. ARENA (which includes the New Zealand Clothing Workers Union) insists that Chinese workers are not our enemies. The problem lies with our governments and the neoliberal globalisation agenda.

China has since initiated free trade negotiations with Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Brazil, Pakistan and Thailand. It is hard to believe that China wants to go further than it has at the WTO or may be required to during the Doha negotiations. That suggests at least three other factors are at play: China’s desire to establish its own hegemony in the region; to secure access to energy, mineral, forestry and fishing resources; and to create opportunities for its firms and investors. Of course, China and Hong Kong have their own Closer Economic Partnership, whose implications are not yet well understood by outsiders. The next link is ASEAN + 3 (China, South Korea and Japan). The regional circle is almost completed with talks just launched on an ASEAN free trade agreement with Australia and New Zealand. It remains unclear where other Asian regional players – notably India – fit into the game plan.

The Pacific Islands get rather lost in this bigger picture, which engulfs us all. I have tried to show why our focus on derailing the WTO meeting in December is important, but also that we need to keep the ministerial meeting in perspective. A failed ministerial does not solve the deeper problems that are endemic to the WTO itself and the outbreak of WTO-compatible agreements that are being initiated all around the world. As governments continue to ride this merry-go-round, often simply for fear of being left out, it is the responsibility of people’s movements to bring sanity to bear.

This broader overview suggests that campaigns around the Hong Kong ministerial need to look beyond the Doha Round to:

1.

challenge the link between Poverty Strategy Reduction Programmes, the Millennium Development Goals, aid and trade negotiations as the tools for the major powers to achieve coherence across the IMF, World Bank and WTO;

2. expose accession as the WTO’s ‘dirty little secret’ where the world’s poorest countries are screwed so the major powers can advance their geopolitical agendas, through campaigns that confront the majors and empower movements in acceding countries to have their governments say ‘no’; and

3. ensure that our campaign on the WTO highlights the link between the WTO and the interlocking network of WTO-compatible regional and bilateral trade and investment negotiations and ‘economic partnerships’ that aim to extend and embed neoliberal globalization so that no country can escape or backtrack.