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Food Standards on the Menu at U.S.-EU Talks
Bottom line: The U.S. won’t be able to guarantee European consumers that imported food products meet EU standards
Apr 17, 2019
With the endorsement on April 15 by a majority of the heads of government of its member states, the European Union has finally taken the formal step needed to move ahead with trade negotiations with the United States. The talks may yet blow up over automobile tariffs, airplane subsidies or a dispute about the inclusion of agriculture in the negotiations. The EU says it never agreed to include agriculture; the Trump administration claims that agriculture is included, and powerful members of Congress have asserted there can't be a deal without it.
The U.S. negotiating objectives clearly intend to cover agriculture broadly. The trade negotiation mandate adopted by the EU has two parts, one of which addresses tariffs and the other, domestic regulatory changes. The negotiation instruction on tariffs is limited to industrial goods and specifically excludes "agricultural products." The latter instruction on regulatory cooperation and compatibility, however, does not exclude agriculture.
Thus, we can be sure that food and agriculture will be directly affected by an EU-U.S. trade deal, because any potential carve-out relates only to discussing tariff reductions. As in the New NAFTA, food and agriculture--including product labeling and oversight of food safety, chemical use and emerging technologies--will still be directly affected. This is because both the EU and the U.S. have committed to reducing so-called "non-tariff barriers" through regulatory cooperation measures, conformity assessments and mutual recognition agreements specifically aimed at public protections such as food safety oversight.
In its negotiating objectives announced in January, the U.S. is quite transparent about wanting to block labeling and oversight of currently unregulated newer genetic manipulation techniques, such as gene editing. In the section on food safety the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) calls for "new and enforceable rules to eliminate unjustified trade restrictions or unjustified commercial requirements (including unjustified labeling) that affect new technologies." The USTR also wants to "establish a mechanism to remove expeditiously unwarranted barriers that block the export of U.S. food and agricultural products in order to obtain more open, equitable, and reciprocal market access."
Public statements by U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue make clear that EU prohibitions on common practices in the U.S., such as using the growth-promoting drug ractopamine in pork production, or chlorine and other chemical rinses to disinfect chicken and vegetables, are the kinds of "unwarranted barriers" he expects a trade deal to lift for U.S. exports to Europe. In recent meetings with members of Congress, Perdue has doubled down on these statements, stating Europe will "pay the price" if it restricts pesticides including RoundUp, which contains the endocrine-disrupting ingredient glyphosate, or if it continues to require stringent oversight of gene editing and other new technologies.
The EU wants what it calls a "conformity assessment" agreement that would require the U.S. to accept EU regulators' determinations--and vice versa--as spelled out in the second part of its negotiating mandate. There are no red lines in this document that would exclude food and agriculture, as is made clear in the accompanying negotiating directives. The only real constraint on the EU's negotiating authority relates to President Trump's threats to impose auto tariffs: The European Commission "may suspend negotiations if the United States adopts trade restrictions against European Union exports on the basis of Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act or under any other similar United States law." In a previously leaked memo to the European Parliament's Trade Policy Committee the trade directorate explained its approach to the U.S. negotiations in more detail, touting conformity assessments and mutual recognition agreements in order to "provide for mechanisms to avoid an unnecessary duplication of costs" in agreed-upon "areas of economic importance." While the EU insists it will maintain current protections and not agree to conformity measures where there are "important systemic differences," food safety was specifically mentioned as a possible area of agreement in this memo.
What could a trade agreement devoted to conformity assessment mean in practice? Even if the U.S. doesn't export its food safety standards and the EU maintains its current protections--as its politicians insist it will--the negotiations will still result in weaker food safety protections. Why? Lax inspection and compliance oversight will be exported instead. The plan proposed by both U.S. and EU trade negotiators is to rely on each other's systems for inspecting products and certifying compliance. How then will the U.S. system--which relies heavily on chemical treatments to kill contaminants and end-product inspections--guarantee that U.S. products meet the tougher food safety standards of the EU, where farm-to-fork tracking protects against contamination throughout production, slaughter and processing?
Bottom line: The U.S. won't be able to guarantee European consumers that imported food products meet EU standards. In fact, the food safety system overseen by the U.S. government can't even assure U.S. consumers that our food is safe. The U.S. has a broken system that's rapidly deteriorating under the Trump administration. For example, as the New York Times editorial board explains, the administration plans to drastically cut independent government trained and employed inspectors by 40 percent, permit unlimited slaughterhouse line speeds and essentially, allow the industry to regulate itself. The delegation of USDA inspection authority to meat plant employees, who are unable to stop production lines when meat products are contaminated, poses a risk to EU consumers and the reputation of U.S. meat exports. A trade deal that reduces government authority to adopt and enforce protective standards will apply here just as it would in Europe, limiting the ability of future administrations and Congress to reverse the privatization of meat inspection and other food safety measures.
In their joint statement initiating the trade talks, the EU and U.S. presidents announced commencing "a close dialogue on standards in order to ease trade, reduce bureaucratic obstacles, and slash costs." Both the U.S. negotiating objectives and the EU negotiating mandate are premised on the view that maintaining independent regulatory oversight authority after a trade deal is signed is a public burden harming the economy. Yet time and again, just the opposite has proven true. Overlapping oversight can have significant public benefits and helps assure confidence in products in the marketplace and in the economy as a whole.
Take, for example, the Volkswagen emissions testing scandal. U.S. environmental testing (especially at the state government level) discovered widespread cheating by German and other automobile manufacturers that was either overlooked on purpose or left undiscovered by an ineffective EU regulatory system. Had the U.S. and EU already been bound by a trade deal eliminating "duplicative" emissions testing and certification, this fraud on consumers and harm to the environment might never have been uncovered.
Or, consider port of entry checks of food. U.S. sampling of imported meat (what the industry calls a duplicative and unnecessary "barrier to trade" and wants to eliminate through regulatory cooperation) discovered E.coli contamination of Canadian beef, leading to a massive recall. Canadian regulators missed the problem, but because food inspections were required on both sides of the border, a public health crisis was averted. While we don't yet know the full story of the Boeing 737-MAX and the tragic crashes of two of these airplanes, there is general agreement that the U.S. safety certification was rushed and delegated significant responsibilities from the Federal Aviation Administration to the manufacturer. Even recognizing that the EU's Airbus is in competition with the U.S.'s Boeing, is it any wonder that European regulators are rethinking reliance on U.S. regulatory oversight?
There are several reasons that trade negotiations initiated in the Obama administration for a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) broke down even before the 2016 U.S. elections. As IATP has detailed, consumers and farmers in Europe understood that the proposed agreement was a recipe for lowered standards and a flood of industrial food products that would undermine what remained of smaller-scale, more sustainable farming practices. TTIP remains so toxic that the new EU negotiating mandate specifies "The negotiating directives for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership must be considered obsolete and no longer relevant."
That may be so, on paper.
But with TTIP's regulatory conformity goals imported into the new negotiating directives on both sides of the Atlantic, without any red lines clearly excluding agriculture, food and health and environmental standards, it looks like we're being asked to buy a trade policy "pig in a poke."
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By Signing CETA with Justin Trudeau, the EU Isn't Undermining Donald Trump - They're Helping Him
A trade deal with Canada seems an urgent necessity in this brave new world. But, 40,000 of the biggest US corporations have subsidiaries in Canada which could use CETA to sue European governments
Feb 13, 2017
This week the European Parliament finally gets a vote on the Canada-EU trade deal CETA. It's taken years to get to this point, and the vote is likely to be close, reflecting just how contentious global trade policies have become.
Many MEPs are worried about CETA, reflecting the views of millions of European citizens who have been lobbying them to vote it down. They are concerned about the impact it will have on food standards, public services and financial regulation. CETA, like its better known US cousin TTIP is all about deregulation.
There are deep concerns about the 'corporate court' system which will afford so many more corporations special legal process to sue European governments for passing laws they don't like. For all the EU's reforms, environmental regulation, public service nationalisation, financial regulation - all could be challenged, costing the taxpayer on both sides of the Atlantic a fortune.
Despite this, MEPs are wrestling over how to vote. Because in our brave new world, a trade deal with Justin Trudeau's Canada, which shares so many of our values, seems an urgent necessity. Wouldn't it be a reaffirmation of the very liberal international order threatened by Trump? Wouldn't it help us bring together a non-Trump economic bloc?
It's a seductive logic - and enjoyable to give Trump a poke in the eye. But it isn't true. There's nothing more helpful to Trump and the wave of European populism than passing CETA this week.
First CETA would open up Europe to direct challenge by US corporations in special corporate courts. Something like 40,000 of the biggest US corporations have subsidiaries in Canada which could use CETA to sue European governments. This is a game-changer - we've never faced anything like it, and we will get sued for simply passing laws aimed at protecting people and the environment.
Canadian's big mining sector doesn't have any higher 'values' than US big business either. These companies have already shown themselves more than willing to take on governments like Romania, in secret 'courts', under a separate deal, when that government saw fit to halt a mining project built on a site of environmental and historical importance.
For all his rhetoric, Trump is a firm supporter of deregulation and corporate power. A quick look at how US oil, financial, military and pharmaceutical stock rose after Trump's election showed that clearly. Trump is stripping away corporate regulation at a frightening speed. Why would he be against anything that gives US corporations the power to bully foreign countries?
Don't forget - Trump's own interests are involved here. For example, Trump owns quite a lot of land in Scotland and has a history of challenging Scottish regulation which poses any threat to his golfing profits. A corporate court in CETA would help him in future.
Second, CETA has nothing to do with reaffirming European and Canadian values. As a matter of fact, it's all about changing our values. CETA isn't about people at all, but forwarding corporate interests to the point where 'people' barely feature in decision-making. CETA's process of regulatory 'harmonisation' attempts to force regulators to think only about how laws can be as 'minimally trade distorting' as possible. Is that really the pinnacle of European and Canadian 'values'?
Trump claims that corporations have become too mixed up with foreigners, too disinterested in forwarding the interests of the state. We cannot fight this with 'more of the same', by pretending that economic globalisation has been wonderful for everyone and let's have more of it. The idea that trade deals create only 'winners' is totally discredited. But CETA assumes everything is 'win-win' and makes no provision for these losers - even though serious assessments warn that up to 200,000 jobs could be lost and workers relative wages could fall.
This simply helps Trump's rhetoric about salvation to be found in the aggressive nation state, backed to the hilt by corporate power. How do we fight Trumpism? By showing that the solution to devastating corporate trade pacts isn't 'beggar my neighbour' economics, but a trade system based on the needs of society - building public services, creating decent jobs, laws to constrain the most powerful exploiting the least powerful. Without this, everything that Trump represents will grow.
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Breaking Free of Trump's Trap on Trade and Jobs
Why progressives, not Trump, should be leading charge on manufacturing and outsourcing
Jan 09, 2017
As progressives rally to resist him, Trump is building support in key swing states by fighting for American jobs. He is using the bully pulpit to pressure manufacturers to keep jobs here rather than relocating them to low-wage areas. The list of Trump target companies is growing -- Carrier, Rexnord, Ford, GM, Toyota --- with no end in sight. His message is clear -- either make the product in the U.S. or we'll slap a major tariff on the product if you try to import it back into the U.S.
Progressives are flummoxed about how to respond. Some argue that these Trump moves are nothing but phony PR stunts: Carrier was a bribe, Ford wasn't moving the jobs anyway and so on. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is leading this charge:
In other words, it may have sounded as if Mr. Trump was doing something substantive by intervening with Carrier [and Ford], but he wasn't. This was fake policy -- a show intended to impress the rubes, not to achieve real results.
But those "rubes" (dictionary definition, "country bumpkins") who believe their jobs were actually saved, "lined up on the factory floor [and] cheered the news [of a new $700 million investment at the Flat Rock Michigan Ford facility.] United Auto Workers Vice President Jimmy Settles, the union's chief negotiator for Ford, told workers he cried when he heard about the investment," reports ABC News.
Krugman correctly points out the number of jobs saved by Trump's tweets is miniscule, but again he is far too dismissive of the workers involved:
Can political pressure change G.M.'s strategy? It hardly matters: Case-by-case intervention from the top is never going to have a significant impact on a $19 trillion economy.
By saying "it hardly matters" Krugman, along with many progressives, are falling right into the Trump Trap: Either they give some credit to Trump's efforts to keep jobs in the U.S., or they ridicule him for trying to do so, and thereby appear not to care about the real flesh and blood workers whose jobs actually are saved.
The net result is that Trump is fully capturing the trade/jobs issue. He can claim that he alone is rewriting the rules of trade and forcing companies to keep jobs here. If progressives don't wake up soon, we can kiss goodbye to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa and Wisconsin four years from now.
It wasn't always this way
When the deindustrialization process first began in the 1980s to undermine manufacturing, hundreds of progressive activist groups fought to keep manufacturing facilities from leaving. They tried boycotts, worker buyouts, and even sit-ins. The tactics got more and more creative and the energy put forth by progressives of all stripes was impressive. Collectively, they called for a new industrial policy that would rebuild the manufacturing sector and save decent paying jobs, much as Germany had done.
The Labor Institute where I work was drafted in one such struggle in 1985 at a 3M facility in Freehold, N.J.. The local union president, Stanley Fisher, asked us to write to Bruce Springsteen in their behalf. Springsteen, who had just recorded "My Hometown," (a song about a plant closing in the very same town) responded positively. Over the next year he would donate money, perform for the workers at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, and provide public support including a support ad with Willie Nelson in the New York Times. This star power turned that struggle into a massive publicity campaign against 3M.
Thanks to Fisher's tireless efforts, we also reached out to Black 3M workers in South Africa -- then still an Apartheid state -- who courageously staged a half-day strike in behalf of the mostly white New Jersey 3M workers. But the campaign ended like so many others: 3M closed the facility.
The main point is this: the fight against plant closings by any and all means necessary has always been a progressive cause. It should be again.
What happened?
Neoliberalism happened. By the time Bill Clinton was elected president both political parties had imbibed the Kool-Aid of tax cuts, deregulation, reductions in government social spending and the undermining of unions. So-called "free-trade" agreements were the centerpiece of the new neoliberal order. All boats were supposed to rise. But instead of good paying jobs, neoliberalism created runaway inequality with no end in sight. The biggest victims were the poor in declining urban areas, displaced manufacturing workers, and Mexican farmers.
Unions that represented manufacturing workers (like the United Steelworkers, the United Autoworkers and the Communications Workers of America) fought like hell against these trade agreements and took every opportunity to protest against unfair trade. But enough Democrats always sided with the Republicans to pass NAFTA and other corporate-friendly trade measures. Meanwhile U.S. manufacturing fell from 20.1 percent of all jobs in 1980 to only 8.8 percent by 2013.
All along, pundits and academics never tired of telling us that it was inevitable. Erroneously, they said the job loss was really caused by automation and skills mismatches between dislocated workers and the new jobs that supposedly were waiting to be filled. Few bothered to look at Germany which has at least the same level of technology but instead developed a booming manufacturing sector. (See here)
Instead both political parties placed all their bets on the rise of high finance. Deregulating Wall Street would make our IRAs and pensions soar (and fill party campaign coffers as well.) It would build a new service economy and lead the U.S. into a new era of prosperity. You know what happened.
Unfortunately, the neoliberal order impacted the work of progressives as well. Working class issues became less important as organizational silos were created around identity and environmental issues. Philanthropic funding for plant closings fights waned. And as good working class jobs become increasingly insecure, manufacturing workers feared that the fight against climate change could cost them their jobs.
Enter Trump
Progressives are struggling to understand what went wrong: Was it the Russians hackers? the FBI surprise? the electoral college? racism, sexism, and xenophobia? Even taken together, these factors do not sufficiently account for how poorly Clinton underperformed Obama: minus 290,000 votes in Pennsylvania, minus 222,000 votes in Wisconsin and a whopping minus 500,000 votes in Michigan. It's difficult to claim that all those who switched from Obama to Trump were racists, misogynists, etc.
The alternative account is that the neoliberal Democratic Party, exemplified by Hillary, had done nothing to save manufacturing jobs (except the GM bailout during the crash). Worse still, Obama, the party's leader, was pushing hard for another corporate-friendly trade bonanza (the Trans-Pacific Partnership Act), and everyone knew Hillary was for it before she was against it.
The election might have turned out very differently if Obama had spent the last eight years blasting the likes of GM, Ford, Carrier and hundreds of other companies for shipping good paying jobs to Mexico. It would have helped if the Democrats had proposed legislation to prevent the off-shoring of good manufacturing jobs. But Obama and the Democratic Party establishment sipped from the same neo-liberal Kool-Aid: They believed in the blessings of corporate trade, and too many working people believed they were wrong.
Jobs for poor Mexican workers versus jobs for higher paid U.S. workers?
The abdication of the jobs issue to Trump also is connected to the mistaken notion that protecting jobs in the U.S. harms low income people in developing countries like Mexico. But NAFTA has failed to help impoverished factory workers and farmers in Mexico, reports the New York Times. It is painfully obvious that the threat of factory relocations has harmed the bargaining power of workers here and abroad. The big NAFTA winners are financial and corporate elites.
How to break free from the Trump Trap
1. Recognize the scope of the problem: The first step is to understand that the off-shoring of jobs to low wage areas is an enormous problem. "Somewhere between 22 and 29 percent of all U.S. jobs are, or will be, potentially off-shorable within a decade or two," reports Princeton economist Alan Blinder.
It is very telling that the government does not keep separate off-shoring data so we don't know exactly how many layoffs are caused by moving jobs abroad. But it is undoubtedly the case that hundreds of thousands of working people are finding out each year that their jobs will be leaving the U.S. to lower wage areas.
2. Renounce the free movement of capital: We need to challenge capital mobility -- the neoliberal holy sacrament that claims nothing ever should limit the ability of capital to move whenever and wherever it wants. Over 40 years ago, Nobel laureate James Tobin argued that this would inevitably lead to the destruction of social programs and the downward pressure of wages. He was right then and still is. We need to say loud and clear that corporations and their Wall Street puppeteers, shall not be allowed to simply pick up and go to another country for the purpose of securing lower wages and fewer health, safety and environmental regulations. There is nothing sacred about the free flow of capital when it devastates community after community.
3. Organize those threatened with off-shoring: Our job is to reach those workers -- millions of them -- with a very simple message: We demand that Donald Trump and Congress save our jobs as well.
This is a golden opportunity for progressive organizing. Unions and community groups should locate these workers, encourage them to sign petitions, recruit them to show up at Trump events, picket the White House, pressure their congressional representatives and fight for their jobs. Also, support should be built for the kind of anti-offshoring legislation Sanders is offering in the Senate.
4. Off-shoring as an environmental issue. Moving jobs to low-wage areas inevitably means moving towards lower regulatory environments. The factories in China, Mexico and Vietnam do not have anything like the environmental and health/safety protections found in the U.S. So not only are we off-shoring jobs, but we are off-shoring pollution, especially carbon emissions. In addition, by shifting jobs abroad and then re-importing the goods back to the U.S., the extra transportation increases the carbon footprint of each product. In short, if you care about climate change, you have to care about the off-shoring of U.S. jobs.
For the first time since neoliberalism infected the minds of the political and media establishments, the issue of off-shoring is on the national agenda. This is the ideal time for unions and progressive organizations to mobilize impacted workers and raise hell.
Resisting Trump is not enough. We have to build a national movement to reclaim the off-shoring issue as our own. Millions of working people and their communities are waiting for leadership. If we don't provide it, Trump will.
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