A leaked chapter of the secret US-EU trade negotiation known as the TTIP was released Thursday by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), along with an accompanying analysis which finds that public health and food safety could be imperiled if the text under negotiation becomes law.
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The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is one of three so-called “Free Trade” deals being negotiated mostly in secret between the U.S. and various trade partners. Only negotiators of the TTIP and cleared advisors—almost exclusively corporate representatives—have been allowed to see the specifics of the agreement.
Dated June 27, the leaked chapter regards Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) issues, which are those related to food safety as well as animal and plant health.
According to the IATP’s analysis of the leaked text, the document doesn’t describe “everything about where negotiations are headed on food safety,”—it does reveal “enough to raise serious concerns” for those concerned about strong stanards and public health.
The main problem with making such negotiations secret, according to the analysis, is that trade policy inherently “requires that all national regulations protecting public health, the environment and worker safety, be subject to a ‘least trade restrictive’ requirement,” which without proper oversight leads to a natural undermining of regulations related to consumer safety.
Following that line of thinking, the IATP argues that the leaked chapter “clearly indicates negotiators continue to subordinate SPS regulations to the object of maximizing trade.” One example cited is that the text follows U.S. protocols that do not require entry inspections and testing for food (which are relatively stringent in the E.U), meaning “food contamination outbreaks will be harder to trace to their origin, and liability harder to assess.”
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