In the meantime, if you’re in Melbourne or Sydney, you may be interested to come along to a special public meeting next week, to be addressed two prominent Pacific Island trade activists:

Trade, labour mobility and development in the Pacific.

The Australian government has been pushing for greater regional economic integration in the Pacific islands, and promoting a regional trade agreement known as PACER-Plus. But what will free trade and increased overseas investment mean for workers and local communities in the Pacific? What are the costs and benefits of increased labour mobility in the Pacific and seasonal work schemes which provide access for Pacific workers to the Australian and New Zealand labour markets?

Join us to hear from two leading campaigners for trade justice in the Pacific:

* Maureen Penjueli from Fiji is co-ordinator of the Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG), which links regional community, church and women’s organisations to raise awareness about the social, cultural and economic impacts of PACER-Plus and free trade in the Pacific.

* John Salong from Vanuatu is director of the Vanuatu Women’s Development Scheme (VANWODS), a non-government microfinance group, which provides disadvantaged women with access to credit and income earning opportunities. John has been active in the debate about remittances, seasonal labour mobility and development options for rural communities in Vanuatu.

Details:

MELBOURNE:

Date: Monday 16 November 2009, 6.00pm
Venue: Meeting room 1, Ground floor, Trades Hall (Corner Lygon and Victoria Streets, Carlton – enter off Victoria Street).
Full Details here (PDF)

SYDNEY:

Date: Thursday 19th November 2009 at 6pm
Venue: Mitchell Theatre, Level 1, Sydney Mechanic School of Arts, 280 Pitt Street, Sydney CBD .
Full details here (PDF).

The speakers have been organised by Aid/Watch, and are being supported by Global Trade Watch.  For further information contact: Gary Lee (Aidwatch) on (02) 95578944 or Nic Maclellan on 0421840100.

UPDATE:

There’s also a meeting in Canberra:

Date: Tuesday 17 November 2009 at 6pm
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Manning Clark Centre, Australian National University
Full details here (PDF)

Last year, he was also appointed by the Un to the position of “Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health”.  (Yes, that’s his actual job title!  Fantastic isn’t it – I wonder how he fits it on his business cards?)

Anyway, on June 2 Grover presented his annual report to to the UN Human Rights council. (You can also download his accompanying speech here – most of the quotes below are from the speech.)

His report is an outstanding, scathing attack on the effects of the WTO’s TRIPs agreement, and other bilateral & regional FTAs in denying ordinary people around the world access to life-saving medicines.

He starts with some worrying statistics:

Nearly 2 billion people lack access to essential medicines, and massive inequalities still remain regarding access to health services and medicines around the world, which is partly due to high costs, Improving access to medicines could save 10 million lives a year, 4 million in Africa and South East Asia.

Then he sheets home the blame:

TRIPS and FTAs have had an adverse impact on prices and availability of medicines by creating obstacles for States to comply with their obligations to respect, protect, and fulfill the right to health. Similarly, the lack of capacity, together with external pressures from developed countries has created obstacles for developing countries and LDCs to use TRIPS flexibilities to promote access to medicines.

I am particularly concerned that the supply of generic medicines is now in doubt as countries that have been the generic producers have become TRIPS compliant and have had to introduce product patents.

Among a variety of evidence of how these agreements are blocking access to medicines, his report recounts a shocking story I heard in Thailand in 2007 when I was there filming Squeezed. The story is this:

Thailand also faced pressure following its attempts to lower prices of medicines through compulsory licensing. Between 2006 and 2007, Thailand issued compulsory licences for HIV and heart disease medicines in order to meet its obligations to provide universal access to medicines. In 2007, Thailand was placed on the Special 301 Priority Watch List. The position of the European Commission was also unwelcoming of the measures taken by Thailand. One of the affected companies withdrew seven pending applications for registration of new medicines in Thailand, thus effectively withholding them from the Thai market.

I always thought that this was extraordinary: a pharmaceutical company withholding its medicines from a market that’s in need (and willing to pay!) in “punishment” for a government taking steps to protect the health of its citizens!

Anyway, the impacts of TRIPs and the TRIPs+ provisions of mnay FTA are much wider – it’s worth having a look at the report to see just how wide.

Unforunately the recommendations which accompany the report are neccesarily conservative (nothing inthere about abolishing TRIPs altogether, I’m afraid.)  But it does recommend against TRIPs+ provisions for developing countries (like the ones that Australia includes in its FTAs):

Developing countries and LDCs should not introduce TRIPS-plus standards in their national laws. Developed countries should not encourage developing countries and LDCs to enter into TRIPS-plus FTAs and should be mindful of actions which may infringe upon the right to health.

Which is a start.

The mining industry loves it since it will let them export more Australian minerals to Asia. And the Textile Clothing & Footwear Union hates it, since

Accelerating tariff reductions hurt Australian manufacturers and their workers, this FTA further reduces the scheduled reductions which were announced close to a decade ago.

But a much more significant question is: what do the 560 million citizens of ASEAN – those who will be most affected by this agreement – think of it?

The answer is that it’s extremely difficult to tell, because (and this is something no-one in the media has mentioned, as far as I can find) only 3 of ASEAN’s 10 member nations have any sort of democratic processes to speak of. (I’m counting Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand as democracies here, which leaves Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Burma/Myanmar, and Vietnam, which are all – more or less – dictatorships).

I’ve made the point before that negotiating a “free” trade agreement with a dictatorship is worse than unfair – it’s anti-democratic.

In Australia, while trade negotiators are not elected, they are constrained by an elected government and parliament who must justify their actions to Australian citizens.  In Australia, an attentive and critical press and opposition political parties help to make sure any deal is really in the interests of Australian citizens.  While these protections are not always successful – witness the passing of the US-Australia FTA which was clearly a damaging deal for Australia –the fact that checks and balances exist at least gives trade negotiations some legitimacy.

In dictatorships like China [and 7 of the ASEAN nations], unelected and unaccountable governments face no such “inconvenient” constraints.  There is no system of checks and balances by which citizens might feel that their interests are properly protected from a government known for its high level of corruption.  There is no free media and no opposition to scrutinise the deal which is negotiated.  Indeed, there is no requirement that the dictators even consider the interests of the people over whom they rule.

What right does the Australian government have to impose a free trade agreement on the peoples of ASEAN, without any sort of systems in place to represent their views or interests (rather than the views or interests of their rulers) in negotiations?

And how many Australians want a free trade agreement with vicious, murderous regimes like Burma’s military junta anyway?

Reporter Bronwyn Herbert uses the program to examine some of the issues around the global food trade, and the broader globalisation of food and food production.

Unfortuntaley the focus of the program is mostly on food safety and nutrition, from a consumer perspective: “who polices the safety and freshness, the nutrition and additives?”

It doesn’t touch on many of the arguably more important and controversial issues around globalised, industrial food production: the environmental impacts and the impacts on the world’s poorest people – the farmers struggling to survive on their traditional lands in the face of this corporate-controlled, global food system.

But for what it does cover, it does so really quite well – have a read/listen.

Apparently the federal Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade have been trying to undermine the Rudd Government’s election promises to require “disclosure at point-of-sale of species, country of origin and any certification” and “identifying illegally-logged timber and restrict its import into Australia”.

The article also quotes Alan Oxley, who runs Melbourne-based consultancy ITS Global, and is known far and wide for his work organising conferences to promote the denial of climate change, lobbying on behalf of Malaysian logging giant Rimbunan Hijau (implicated in widespead illegal logging & human rights abuses in PNG) and for setting up a business lobby group for the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement. (Follow the above links to pages from Sourcewatch, and online watchdog which has some good background on Oxley & his company.)

If you’re reading this and would like to do something, please consider emailing Prime Minister Kevin Rudd or emailing or phoning – (02) 6277 7500 – Foreign Minister Stephen Smith and demanding that they commit to fulfilling their election promise to restrict imports of illegally logged timber into Australia.

As the Parliamentary Library noted in December, the AUSFTA has increased Australia’s merchandise imports from the US and reduced our exports, increasing the overall trade deficit with the US.

Feil builds on this analysis, noting that

The trade deficit numbers relate to trade in physical merchandise. They do not include income payments and payments for intangibles such as royalties, management fees, technical service fees and dividends. . .

Analysis of merchandise trade doesn’t take into account the potentially most devastating areas of one-way Australian market penetration created by the USAFTA.

The ABS economic indicator for 2007-08 shows Australia’s “income” deficit in the balance of payments has increased from $37 billion in 2005-06 to $45 billion in 2006-07 and $50 billion in 2007-08.

This is the statistical area where we simply don’t know what is going on, except that we are paying out much more than we are receiving. If we are supposed to become a service economy, the income flow needs to be the other way.

Global Trade Watch join’s Feil’s call for a full government review of this “free” trade agreement, especially in light of Kevin Rudd’s recent admission that the Global Financial Crisis has “called into question the prevailing neo-liberal economic orthodoxy of the past 30 years – the orthodoxy that has underpinned the national and global regulatory frameworks that have so spectacularly failed to prevent the economic mayhem which has now been visited upon us.”

If free trade is not a central neo-liberal economic orthodoxy, I don’t know what is.

Research suggests that FTAs offer little in the way of trade liberalisation and a shift to more liberal trade policies, particularly in agricultural trade. Rather, FTAs are used more often to promote other non-economic, diplomatic and regional interests

The report notes that thanks to the:

• Thai-Australia FTA, Australia’s trade deficit with Thailand has risen from $711 million to $3.5 billion.
• Singapore-Australia FTA, Australia’s trade deficit with Singapore has more than doubled, rising from $3 billion in 2004 to $6.4 billion in 2007
• US-Australia FTA, “exports to the US fell while US imports increased. Manufactured exports fell across most categories in line with the decline in exports. Australian exports of motor vehicles fell by more than 200 per cent from their peak in 2004. Exports of vehicle parts also fell sharply from their peak of $286 million in 2003 to $131 million in 2007. . . Australia’s $13.6 billion trade deficit with the US in 2007 is the highest trade deficit Australia has recorded with any trading partner.”

The report ends with a scathing assessment of the impacts of Australia’s FTAs:

The FTAs were followed by higher Australian trade deficits and a much slower rate of reciprocal export growth, as well as trade diversion as products were sourced from countries with which Australia has zero tariffs.

The potential risks of the current FTA model adopted by Australia are clear: structural trade imbalances leading to higher trade deficits favouring the FTA partner country, long phase-in periods for free trade (in particular agricultural trade), and negative impacts on the Australian economy which are related to trade diversion.

The anticipated gains for Australian exporters have fallen well short of estimates. Given the growing importance of FTAs in the Asia-Pacific economy, policymakers need to evaluate FTA models and their importance relative to the region’s most significant multilateral project, APEC.

So Mr Rudd (& Mr Crean), why are we negotiating more of these agreements?

The global industry protection policy development of the past 30 years has moved light years away from tariffs and has extended into the much broader arena of every other form of government assistance.

Our government is giving money to the car industry. It is guaranteeing the money markets. It is lowering interest rates to stimulate sales in the finance sector. It will tax us to pay for innovations in climate change. It will give individuals cash gifts to stimulate spending. It will spend the surplus to bring infrastructure forward to create jobs in the construction industry. It is picking winners and losers all over the place.

So does that mean that tariff levels are pretty irrelevant now?  (In Australia at least…)

And a more important question: If successful economies are using government assistance in place of tariffs to protect and support their economies, where does that leave developing countries?  Restricted in their use of tariffs by mulilateral or bilateral trade agreements, but unable to afford significant government assistance to industry in the ways listed above, how are developing countries supposed to develop?

“For too long we have been focused on expanding and maximising energy exports, without proper protection for our own future generations.”

What?  Read that again – not only is he arguing for “protection” of particular interests against the blind short-termism of maximising Australian exports for short term gain, but he is doing it with his vision set of the rights and needs of “future generations”!

For decades environmentalists have argued that the rights of future generations need to be taken into account when decisions about resource extraction and pollution are being made.  And for years “fair traders” have argued that the needs of people and then environment should take perference over the simple maximisation of exports for short term gain.  It’s incredibly exciting to realise that these concepts are now well and truly mainstream.

Indeed so minor, that it really begs the question of why the government went to the trouble of negotiating the agreement in the first place.

In 2006, Australia’s total merchandise exports to Chile were just $233 million – that is about one thousandth of our total merchandise exports of $180billion.

Perhaps the real reason is that 57% of Australia’s exports to Chile are coal, and the fact that we now have an FTA with them probably says more about the power of the coal industry in Australia than anything else.

However, there has been some real concern from Australian farmers that the deal will have a significant adverse impact on Australian horticulture.  Because Chile is in the southern hemisphere its produce – grown by workers paid about 40% less than Australian horticultural wages – will increasingly be competing directly with Australian produce on supermarket shelves.

A further concern is that this is Australia’s 3rd FTA (alongside agreements with Thailand and Singapore) to include “investor-state” provisions, which allow foreign investors to demand compensation from governments for regulations or laws which “expropriate” their property rights, which can include their right to future profits.  Under the FTA, investors can “sue” the government at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), an undemocratic, non-transparent arbitration court run by the World Bank.  Thus the agreement confers rights on foreign investors beyond those enjoyed by Australian investors.

This agreement explicitly allows “expropriation” to include government actions which have “an effect equivalent to direct expropriation without formal transfer of title or outright seizure”.  Such provisions have been abused by large corporations – most famously under the NAFTA agreement – to demand large sums of money from governments resulting from new environmental and health regulations.

The negotiators of this FTA have tried to avoid this with a section which states that “Except in rare circumstances, non-discriminatory regulatory actions by a Party that are designed and applied to protect legitimate public welfare objectives, such as public health, safety, and the environment, do not constitute indirect expropriations.”

The big question is: what are the “rare circumstances” where public health or environmental laws DO constitute expropriation?  And will the government have to explore this in future in an undemocratic, international arbitration court whose decisions are binding?

For some other concerns with this FTA, you can read the submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties from AFTInet.

UPDATE: you can also read some concerns about intellectual property in the Australia-Chile FTA from ANU academic Mathew Rimmer.