TTIP, the
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership: ever heard of it? Do
you know what it means? If the answer is no, don't worry. TTIP (not
to be confused with TPP) is a series of trade negotiations being
carried out between the EU and US. The bilateral trade agreement
deals with reducing regulatory barriers to big business trade: food
safety law, environmental legislation, banking regulations and the
sovereign powers of individual nations ... told you it was sexy
TTIP
has been kicked into the long grass … for a very long time
Larry Elliott
Trade
talks are agonisingly slow at the best of times, especially so when
they involve harmonising standards on controversial issues
Tuesday 3 May 2016
18.58 BST
As talks to broker a
global trade deal entered a second tortuous decade, the US and the
European Union came up with an idea. Since it was proving impossible
to find agreement among the 150 or so members of the World Trade
Organisation about how to tear down barriers to freer commerce, they
would strike their own agreement.
Talks on the
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) began in the
summer of 2013 with officials in Washington and Brussels confident
they could iron out any difficulties by the time American voters
decide on who should succeed Barack Obama as president in November
this year.
This always looked a
ridiculously tight timetable and so it has proved. Cutting trade
deals is an agonisingly slow process. The last successful global deal
– the Uruguay Round – took seven years before being concluding in
1993. Talks continued on the Doha Round from 2001 until 2015 before
terminal boredom and frustration set in. Was it really feasible that
TTIP could be pushed through in little more than three years? Not a
chance.
There are three
reasons for that. First, the main barriers to trade between the US
and the EU are not traditional tariff barriers, which have been
steadily whittled away in the decades since the second world war, but
the differing regulatory regimes that operate on either side of the
Atlantic. America and Europe have different views on everything from
GM food to safety standards on cars so harmonising standards was
always going to take a lot of time.
Second, the talks
have involved controversial issues and have been taking place when
trust in politicians and business has rarely been lower. The main
driving forces behind TTIP have been multinational corporations and
business lobby groups, who stand to gain from harmonised regulations.
With information about the secret negotiations having to be chiselled
out by groups hostile to TTIP, voters have drawn the obvious
conclusion: the aim of the talks is to enrich big business even if it
means playing fast and loose with environmental and health standards.
Which leads to the
final and most important factor: there are no votes in trade. It
would have been no surprise had Angela Merkel voiced strong
opposition to the state of the TTIP negotiations, given the level of
public antipathy to the trade deal in Germany and her delicate
position in the polls ahead of elections next year.
Instead, the German
chancellor was beaten to it by François Hollande (also facing a
showdown with the voters in 2017) who has made it clear he will not
sign TTIP in its current form. Years not months of hard slog lie
ahead, by which time the US is likely to have a president much less
wedded to the idea of striking trade deals. TTIP has just been kicked
into the long grass for a very long time, and perhaps for good.
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