17 September 2015, The Conversation, Free trade agreements fail to boost Australian agriculture and food manufacturing. Many claims are made that Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with select trading partners will benefit Australian agriculture. OECD statistics say otherwise. The balance of trade positions of Australian agriculture and food manufacturing have deteriorated since FTAs with New Zealand, the United States and Thailand have come into play. The long-standing 1983 New Zealand arrangement shows growing imports of processed food products, especially since 2000. Australian food exports to New Zealand have levelled off since 2011 with a US$600 million Australian deficit on food products in 2014. Agricultural goods have been close to balance with just over US$270 million of raw or minimally processed product flowing each way. The net result (shown in black) has been a persistent and generally worsening deficit for Australia in its agriculture and food trade with New Zealand for the whole period. Read More here
Tag Archives: trade agreements
23 June 2015, Common Dreams, ‘A Great Day for Corporate America’: US Senate Passes Fast Track. ‘Shameful’ vote all but ensures approval of mammoth trade deals like the TransPacific Partnership. In a win for multinational corporations and the global one percent, the U.S. Senate on Tuesday narrowly advanced Fast Track, or Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) —ensuring for all practical purposes the continued rubber-stamping of clandestine trade agreements like the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The cloture motion to end debate needed 60 votes and it got just that, passing the chamber60-37. The full roll call is here. A final vote will come on Wednesday. Having overcome the biggest hurdle, the legislation is expected to pass, and will then be sent to President Barack Obama’s desk to become law. Read More here
8 June 2015, Ralph Nader, 10 Reasons the TPP Is Not a ‘Progressive’ Trade Agreement: One must seriously question what President Obama and his corporate allies believe to be the definition of “progressive” when it comes to this grandiose statement. History shows the very opposite of progress when it comes to these democratic sovereignty-shredding and job-exporting corporate-driven trade treaties — unless progress is referring to fulfilling the deepest wishes of runaway global corporations.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) set our country’s progress back through large job-draining trade deficits, downward pressure on wages, extending Big Pharma’s patent monopolies to raise consumers’ medicine prices, floods of unsafe imported food, and undermining or freezing consumer and environmental rules. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is formally described as a trade and foreign investment agreement between 12 nations — Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam. The White House is now pressuring Congress to Fast Track through the TPP. Fast Track authority, a Congressional procedure to limit time for debate and prohibit amendments to proposed legislation, has already passed in the Senate, although only after an unexpectedly rough ride. Here are 10 reasons why the TPP is explicitly not a “progressive” trade agreement: Read Them here
4 June 2015, Alternet, WikiLeaks Releases Secret Documents Related to Controversial US Trade Pact: Document dump regarding Trade in Services Agreement comes day after organization put $100,000 bounty on documents from series of US trade treaties…Among the text leaked on Wednesday are Tisa’s annex on telecommunications services, an amendment that would standardize regulation of telecoms across member countries, according to WikiLeaks. Other documents in the batch of files relate to e-commerce, transportation of living people and regulation of financial services corporations. Read More here