SENIOR European and American sources are privately claiming a “narrow victory on points” and “some concessions” after the 12th round of formal negotiations into the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) wound up in Brussels at the weekend with an agreement still some way off.
Many roadblocks remain to the deal, which will impact on 800 million consumers and aims to harmonise regulatory standards, remove often prohibitive tariffs on thousands of items and assist even the smallest companies do more business with their transatlantic neighbours.
But its critics contend that the behemoth trade deal would weaken environmental and consumer standards and, most controversially in this latest phase, places too much power in the hands of companies to legally challenge governments.
The Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) is a legal mechanism which allows foreign corporations to sue governments before special tribunals if they feel their investments are “endangered” by government decisions.
Just last week one of the UK’s leading QCs Michael Bowsher, a former chair of the Bar Council’s EU law committee, claimed the special TTIP trade court would make it easier for private companies providing services to the NHS in the UK to sue the government.
And he claimed a deal poses “a real and serious risk” to future UK government decision-making regarding the NHS, and has joined other opponents in calling for the ISDS element of TTIP to be jettisoned.
However, those negotiating the current deal insist there won’t be a dumbed-down or ‘TTIP Light’ – that’s it all or nothing.
One US source even warned: “If we don’t work together and do this deal, China is gonna come in.”
Global trade deals, especially one of TTIP’s magnitude, aren’t normally played out on the public stage.
But despite the negotiations being conducted behind closed doors at a pace slower than the erosion of the UK coastline, details of each round are subsequently published online.
And at each stage interested stakeholder groups can give an input and publicly challenge the most recent text (two more TTIP rounds are scheduled to take place before the summer).
Given that 28 EU states are offering an opinion, the public profile of TTIP has been cranked up significantly on the European side in recent months, but not so much in the US.
This week a team of European financial journalists are in Washington and will later travel to New Orleans in Louisiana as guests of the Americans, who appear frustrated at the slow progress on TTIP.
There they’ll have a series of meetings with the US Department of Commence focusing on European business investment in the US and a round-table with the US Department of State looking at US-European relations.
Today the journalists are due to meet US trade representative Ambassador Michael Froman, President Obama’s principal adviser, negotiator and spokesman on international trade and investment issues.
The TTIP media programme also takes in number of site visits, including to a farm in Western Hanover County in Virginia which specialises in grass-fed beef, pasture-raised pork, free-range chicken, turkey and eggs, and speciality non-GMO grains for foodstuff.
As part of the TTIP talks the Americans are seeking a significant increase in their agricultural exports to the EU, which make up less than €13 billion of the €155bn the country sends overseas each year and which are at only a third of the level they were in 1980.
European is digging in its heels over fears around genetically-modified food, while the US insists it’s hard to see Congress approving a TTIP agreement that doesn’t address this disparity.
That’s just another example of how far apart the sides are on reaching a final conclusion to the trade deal, and realistically it’s unlikely to go before legislators until well into 2017.
