Australia walks away from Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal talks

[fingrin]

6. What the TPPA means for New Zealand ( posted in another thread)

Subsidized medicines

The Pharmaceutical Management Agency (PHARMAC) decides what medicines the New Zealand government buys and subsidises for use by the public. Because PHARMAC purchases in bulk and makes its decisions in the interests of New Zealanders, we pay far less for medicines than we otherwise would.

A leaked negotiating text shows what the US is demanding on behalf of its big drug companies (known as “Big Pharma”) and how the benefits New Zealanders enjoy under PHARMAC are threatened by the TPPA. Although PHARMAC itself will not be dismantled, under the leaked text PHARMAC would:

not be able to negotiate a bulk discount for medicines
have to give detailed reasons to the drug companies about every purchasing decision
give pharmaceutical companies the right to appeal PHARMAC’s decisions
publish the identities of all decision-makers around the purchasing of medicines.

If adopted, this text would strengthen Big Pharma’s leverage over PHARMAC. The drug companies’ would gain new rights and opportunities to lobby PHARMAC decision makers and challenge their credentials, demand reasons if PHARMAC rejects their ‘expert’ reports and data, and pressure its decisions by constant threats of appeal. The goal of the big pharmaceutical companies is to influence PHARMAC’s criteria and decisions in their favour at the expense of affordability for the public. If the leaked text is adopted then government would have to massively increase the health budget, reduce the availability of subsidised drugs, or increase the price paid by ordinary New Zealanders.

Affordability of medical devices
Medical devices like heart valves, replacement hip joints and lenses for cataract operations are all now being brought under PHARMAC, so the same problems will apply as with medicines.

Generic pharmaceuticals
One reason why life-saving drugs are affordable for ordinary people — in New Zealand and overseas — is the availability of “generic” alternatives to branded pharmaceuticals. Generics are identical to their branded equivalents, but cost only a fraction of the price. Their availiability helps PHARMAC keep the price it pays for medicines down.

Generics can only be sold in New Zealand where no local patent has been granted, where that patent has expired, or a licence has been issued. Another leaked negotiating text from February 2011 threatens kiwis’ ability to access generic medicines:

Patents on medications could in effect be extended, as pharmaceutical companies would be able to claim additional patents on medications where they discover an alternative use for them, or make a minor modification. This would apply even if the modification were clinically insignificant. It would effectively mean the original product would be withheld from the generic market even though its patent had expired.
The life-time of patents could be extended to take into account the time taken for a new medicine to be approved as safe.
Medsafe — the government body responsible checking whether new pharmaceuticals are safe for New Zealanders — would be forced to investigate whether the drugs they are approving have patents on them or not. This is called “patent linkage”, and it would delay the approval of generics even though drug patenting has nothing to do with drug safety.
Big pharmaceutical companies would be able to prevent generic manufacturers from using original safety testing data for longer, meaning that the registration of generic medicines is postponed.

Every delay in the availability of generic medicines means more money for big pharmacutical companies, and higher prices for kiwis.

GM Food

New Zealanders are wary about genetic modification. In 2001 The Royal Commission on Genetic Modification asked what we thought about GM, and we came back against it — we didn’t want to risk our health or our amazing natural world, we wanted to respect tangata whenua beliefs, and we didn’t trust big business to look out for our interests. Being GM-free has become part of who we are, the same as being nuclear free. It’s not just kiwis who see ourselves that way — our 100% pure, clean-green image is how we are seen by the world, and is a big advantage to our economy.

The TPPA negotiations are putting our anti-GM stance at risk. Away from the public eye, the United States and its big business lobbyists are looking to lock in a new set of rules to open our fields and our supermarket shelves to genetically modified organisms.

Labeling of genetically modified products
At the moment, any food with more than 1% GM content has to be labelled. This way, we get to choose whether or not we bring GMO into our homes. Because supermarkets know we don’t like GM, they generally don’t bother stocking GM products.

It’s no secret that the United States trade negotiators want us to get rid of our GM labeling rules. The annual US report on New Zealand’s ‘trade barriers’ confirmed that they will “continue to raise trade-related concerns with mandatory biotechnology labelling regimes”. The Biotech Industry Organization — who represent the world’s giant GMO companies like Monsanto and Cargill — have also stated that they want GM labelling restricted under the TPPA.

83% of New Zealanders are in favour of GM labelling, so let’s make sure our government doesn’t scrap it behind our backs — if they do the only winners will be the giant US agri-businesses who want to sell us their GM products.

Genetically modified crops
New Zealand law is pretty tough about introducing GM crops, and public opinion suggests that we want to keep it that way. Fortunately, all the major political parties seem to agree. However, our GMO rules are at risk — the US lead negotiator is on record stating that the US wants to use the TPP negotiations to promote agricultural biotechnology within the negotiating countries.

Food safety
GM aside, New Zealand has many other rules to make sure that plant and animal products are safe for New Zealanders and our environment — rules about how much pesticide residue can be present on our food, how food products are preserved and transported, and about testing to make sure imported products meet our standards. These rules (called “Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures” and “Technical Barriers to Trade”) are especially important to New Zealand because we need to protect our unique eco-system and our extensive agricultural and horticultural industries.

There are already international rules around how countries set their own measures. The US and its farmers lobby is pushing for all TPPA countries to adopt a more coordinated approach. Under the TPPA we risk losing the right to decide for ourself how we protect our people and the environment, instead having to follow a set of rules secretly negotiated overseas.

Worse, if we brought in new rules to restrict dangerous additives or toxic residues, investors from those countries could sue the New Zealand government for compensation in a private international tribunal. This happened in Canada last year when the giant US chemical company DowAgro Sciences sued Quebec for banning the use of a dangerous pesticide, using an agreement called NAFTA that does not go nearly as far as proposals for the TPPA. Just the threat of a long and expensive court case with a rich multinational company can be enough to get governments to back down on environmental protection measures. This isn’t right — the environment should come before corporate profits.

Tobacco

Smoking kills around 5000 New Zealanders every year. However, the number of kiwis smoking is on the decline — in large part because of tobacco control measures undertaken by the government, such as banning smoking in workplaces, increasing the cost of tobacco, and banning the retail display of cigarettes. The government has committed itself to making New Zealand essentially smokefree by 2025.

If New Zealand signs up to the TPPA, we’ll be putting our smokefree goal at risk.

This is because a leaked TPPA text shows that New Zealand’s negotiators seem willing to give more rights to big overseas companies, including the right to sue the government for making decisions which significantly hurt their investment. This process is called Investor-State Dispute Settlement and it takes place in secretive offshore arbitration tribunals, bypassing New Zealand’s courts. Anti-smoking measures taken by our government could be challenged by the tobacco companies if we sign the TPPA.

If you think this sounds far-fetched, it’s not — the Australian government is currently being sued by Philip Morris for its new plain packaging policy under an old international agreement between Australia and Hong Kong. Even though Australia’s highest court has ruled in favour of plain packaging, the government still faces international arbitration away from the eyes of the public, and could end up paying hundreds of millions of dollars to big tobacco for trying to protect the health of its citizens. Like Australia, our smokefree law could be challenged under an existing agreement, but it would be difficult and involve back door menouvering. The TPP would let big tobacco stride through the front door.

It isn’t just plain packaging laws that will face problems if the TPPA negotiations are completed. Other policies that could fall foul of the rules include:

banning the use of terms like ‘mild’, ‘smooth’, ‘fine';
controlling the use of flavours that disguise the foul taste of tobacco;
reducing the nicotine content of tobacco products; and
capping the number of tobacco retail outlets.

Many different chapters of the TPPA would impact on the smokefree policies, for example:

intellectual property laws could be strengthened in favour of big tobacco companies, making it easier for them to claim that tobacco control policies infringe their trademarks;

big tobacco’s factories, distibution chains and intellectual property rights would be ‘protected investments’ who could also sue;
advertisers, duty free stores, retailers, and other parts of the tobacco supply chain would also have special rights, even if they were operating by Internet from offshore; and
new “transparency” and “regulatory coherence” rules would give tobacco companies much more influence over government decisions on tobacco control. This would go against another agreement signed by New Zealand — the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) — requiring the government to take steps to prevent tobacco company interfering in policy-making!

All of this goes in the opposite direction to New Zealand’s obligations under the FCTC.

Alcohol

Alcohol abuse is a big problem in New Zealand. Part of the solution is setting rules around the sale of alcohol — for example, a minimum price per unit of alcohol, lower limits on the alcohol content of RTDs, and banning advertising and sponsorship by alcohol companies.

As with tobacco, a TPPA will put the New Zealand government at risk of law suits from overseas companies for trying to reduce the damage caused by alcohol abuse. This could see the government paying millions of taxpayer dollars to overseas companies in compensation, or backing down from policies that protect New Zealanders.

The government will also face pressure to allow imports of products that meet the alcohol product standards in other TPP countries, even when they are inconsistent with our own.

That already happens: under another agreement (the CER) New Zealand is bound to recognise Australia’s regulatory standards. The government had to back down this year on its intention to cap the alcohol content of RTDs popular with underage drinkers — it could not have stopped Australian RTDs, with a higher legal alcohol limit, from being sold in NZ unless it changed the CER rules. Under the TPPA we risk the same thing, but with all 10 negotiating countries. This would have the same effect as watering down our regulations to the country with the lowest standards.

As with tobacco, the government risks being bound to increased “transparency” obligations around its decision-making process for alcohol policy. In practice, this means giving alcohol companies more say in what the government does to protect New Zealanders from alcohol abuse.