FOLKS, Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) really matters!

Trans-Pacific Partnership: An analysis

After years of requests by hundreds of organizations including the American Friends Service Committee, the White House finally has released a draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) text.

If approved by Congress, the TPP would set rules governing approximately 40 percent of the global economy. Frighteningly, this pact puts corporations firmly in the driver’s seat shaping health, environmental and economic policies around the globe.

The newly released text clearly demonstrates what has long been feared: The TPP’s investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions would enable investors from any of the 11 participating countries to challenge environmental and public health laws, regulations and court decisions in international tribunals that circumvent the U.S. and any other country’s judicial system.

A number of smaller free trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties already grant these powers to transnational corporations — and they are being used to attack clean air rules in Peru, mining laws in El Salvador, a provincial fracking moratorium in Canada and a court decision against the oil giant Chevron in Ecuador, among many other examples. Expanding this system throughout the Pacific Rim would only increase the occurrence of these challenges and further open governments to lawsuits costing millions or even billions of dollars for protecting their citizens.

The ISDS provisions alone are reason to sink the entire TPP deal, but that's just one of the concessions that the over 600 corporate advisors to the negotiations have inserted that will guarantee corporate profits while harming the rest of us. Under the TPP, U.S. exports of fracked natural gas would automatically be deemed in the public interest, bypassing certain environmental and economic reviews, if going to any of eleven TPP countries throughout the Pacific Rim – including Japan, the world’s largest importer of natural gas.

While corporations reap a profit, AFSC's work around the world has shown us who bears the brunt of the human cost of climate change – the poorest and the most marginalized communities.

In addition, the TPP is full of language designed to delay the introduction of low-cost generic medications and that enables pharmaceutical companies to challenge members’ public health programs’ cost-saving mechanisms. This threatens to increase health care prices and reduce access to medicine for residents of member countries, once again lining the pockets of the wealthy off the backs of the poor.

The TPP may benefit some Wall Street executives, but it is a disaster for the environment and for public health and it must be stopped. AFSC has been working with a nation-wide coalition of labor, environmental, consumer, and faith-based organizations to stop the TPP and push for trade policies that put people over profits.

For more resources on the TPP, visit:

Corporate Attacks on the Public Interest

Public Citizen