WASHINGTON, Nov.
23, 2016 - The death of the Trans-Pacific Partnership has given new life to
another multinational trade pact, but this one is being led by China and
doesn’t include the U.S.
The Regional
Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) offers China the opportunity to exert
leadership in the Pacific Rim, where the Obama administration had hoped to
guide how international trade is conducted. And that could be bad news for
American agriculture, U.S. government and industry officials say.
U.S. Trade
Representative Michael Froman has been saying for months that if Congress does
not ratify TPP, with its built-in protections for environment and labor
standards, the way would be paved for China to take the lead in commerce with
the dozens of nations that border the Pacific Ocean.
“Many of the TPP
countries are also involved in that (RCEP) negotiation and we’re already seeing
accelerated efforts by the Chinese to try and move that negotiation forward,”
Froman told Agri-Pulse in an interview.
That could be a
problem for the U.S., said Joe Glauber, a senior research fellow
with the International Food Policy Research Initiative, and a former USDA chief
economist and one-time USTR chief agriculture negotiator.
By ditching TPP and allowing RCEP to take its place, he
said, the U.S. would be ceding its leadership not just to China, but also to
other major trading competitors that are also part of TPP.
“I think we are losing out over the longer term,” Glauber
said in an interview. “Australia and others are going to benefit from other
trade agreements, and I think we need to be part of that, not standing outside
looking in.”
Earlier this year
Froman confirmed that other countries were lining up to join in what was planned
to be a 12-member TPP: the U.S., Japan, Vietnam, Australia, Malaysia,
Singapore, Peru, Mexico, Canada, New Zealand, Chile and Brunei. There was even
talk that China might eventually seek to enter the pact.
On Sunday,
President Barack Obama concluded what will likely be his last official overseas
trip in Lima, Peru, where he attended the annual Asia-Pacific Economic
Cooperation (APEC) meeting. Under different circumstances, he might have been
planning the implementation of the TPP with other leaders, as all of the TPP
member countries were represented at the summit.
But the
international spotlight has shifted to the RCEP, where China is already a
participant, along with several countries that were in the final stages of
ratifying TPP. The 16 countries negotiating RCEP are China, the Philippines,
Japan, Australia, India, South Korea, New Zealand, Brunei, Burma, Cambodia,
Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand.
At APEC, Peru President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski addressed the
rising tide of anti-globalism that played a role in the U.S. election campaign,
during which both Trump and Hillary Clinton bashed the TPP.
“The world today values human and social development,”
Kuczynski said on Sunday. “Growth by itself is not enough. We have to do more.
In this APEC meeting, facing a rapidly changing international context, we are
going to try to emphasize, strongly, the points we think are important for the
inclusive, sustainable growth of the Asia-Pacific.”
For now, though, there seems little hope of revival of the
TPP any time soon.
Floyd Gaibler,
director of trade policy for the U.S. Grains Council, said in an interview
Monday morning that he was still hopeful TPP could be revived. But that was
before President-elect Donald Trump announced that night that he would start
the withdrawal process from TPP on his first day in office.
“On trade, I am going to issue a notification of intent to
withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a potential disaster for our
country,” Trump said in a video
statement. “Instead, we will negotiate fair bilateral trade deals
that bring jobs and industry back onto American shores.”
That would be a setback
on the international stage, Froman said.
“There’s no
problem with (RCEP) moving forward as long as TPP does,” he said. “But if RCEP
moves forward and TPP doesn’t, we’re going to find ourselves facing a set of
rules in the region that don’t necessarily reflect out interests and our
values.”
Gaibler said the
TPP would be key in allowing the U.S. to set the international trade standards.
“I think whoever
has the broadest group of support for a trade policy over there is going to set
the standard for the rest of Southeast Asia and possibly in this hemisphere,”
he said. “The TPP was designed to be a free trade policy for Asian and Pacific
countries and that includes our hemisphere and Asia, so it’s critically
important that whichever trade architecture is going to win out is going to set
the rules of the road. That’s why it’s important for economic, but also
geopolitical reasons.”
#30
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