Japan has expressed concern about a loss of momentum in talks on a pan-Pacific trade pact after participants failed to agree to meet again this month to try to clinch a deal that would cover 40 percent of the global economy.
Ministers from the 12 nations negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which would stretch from Japan to Chile, fell short of a deal at talks last month on the Hawaiian island of Maui, despite early optimism.
Japanese Minister of State for Economic and Fiscal Policy Akira Amari, in a blogpost circulated yesterday, also questioned why the US appeared to have lacked its usual “stubborn persistence” at those talks, despite a willingness by some countries to stay to try to reach an agreement.
“The reason I stressed ... that we should meet again this month, was because each country might lose interest and [the talks] would go adrift,” Amari wrote.
“If they lose interest, it would take considerable time and effort to get motivation back to the original level, because the key to success is whether each country can maintain momentum towards an agreement,” Amari added.
Amari said that the US was vague about a concrete time frame and it appeared its negotiators needed a break.
Amari reiterated that a dispute over intellectual property protection for data used to develop biologic drugs, which Washington insists should be 12 years, and gaps over access to member countries’ dairy markets — a key issue for New Zealand — were major sticking points.
“What every country thought was strange was that the United States did not show its usual stubborn persistence this time, but simply gave up,” he wrote, adding that the US negotiators seemed to have judged that agreement could not be reached in a day or two.
Meanwhile, labor activists worry the TPP negotiation will prioritize corporate profits over workers’ rights and pressure governments to bow to the will of investors.
Campaigners for workers’ rights complain that they have been denied a voice in the trade talks, and have raised concerns about part of the deal that would allow corporations to sue governments for the potential loss of future profits.
“The investor-state dispute settlement provisions in this massive trade deal ... if it’s passed, binds them to a convoluted logic that allows multinational corporations to sue ... if a government passes a law or regulation that protects its people to the possible detriment of sales,” Solidarity Center executive director Shawna Bader-Blau said.
“Corporate rights are treated as portable, binding and protected by enforceable laws in global trade agreements, but not so human rights,” Bader-Blau said at the opening of a migrant labor conference on Monday hosted by Solidarity Center in Bogor, 60km south of the Indonesian capital, Jakarta.
Speaking before more than 200 labor and migration experts from 45 countries, Bader-Blau said that while investor rights are protected, human rights are “relegated to unenforceable side agreements, aspirational multilateral protocols, spotty national laws and no accountability.”
“Sitting here in Asia, you cannot help but think of slavery on ships, mass graves, the US government’s disastrous upgrade of Malaysia in its trafficking in persons report — enormous desperation fueling enormous wealth,” she said.
France cannot afford to ignore the third credit-rating reduction in less than a year, French Minister of Finance Roland Lescure said. “Three agencies have downgraded us and we can’t ignore this cloud,” he told Franceinfo on Saturday, speaking just hours after S&P lowered his country’s credit rating to “A+” from “AA-” in an unscheduled move. “Fundamentally, it’s an additional cloud to a weather forecast that was already pretty gray. It’s a call for lucidity and responsibility,” he said, adding that this is “a call to be serious.” The credit assessor’s move means France has lost its double-A rating at two of the
Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), founder and CEO of US-based artificial intelligence chip designer Nvidia Corp and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) on Friday celebrated the first Nvidia Blackwell wafer produced on US soil. Huang visited TSMC’s advanced wafer fab in the US state of Arizona and joined the Taiwanese chipmaker’s executives to witness the efforts to “build the infrastructure that powers the world’s AI factories, right here in America,” Nvidia said in a statement. At the event, Huang joined Y.L. Wang (王英郎), vice president of operations at TSMC, in signing their names on the Blackwell wafer to
AI BOOST: Although Taiwan’s reliance on Chinese rare earth elements is limited, it could face indirect impacts from supply issues and price volatility, an economist said DBS Bank Ltd (星展銀行) has sharply raised its forecast for Taiwan’s economic growth this year to 5.6 percent, citing stronger-than-expected exports and investment linked to artificial intelligence (AI), as it said that the current momentum could peak soon. The acceleration of the global AI race has fueled a surge in Taiwan’s AI-related capital spending and exports of information and communications technology (ICT) products, which have been key drivers of growth this year. “We have revised our GDP forecast for Taiwan upward to 5.6 percent from 4 percent, an upgrade that mainly reflects stronger-than-expected AI-related exports and investment in the third
RARE EARTHS: The call between the US Treasury Secretary and his Chinese counterpart came as Washington sought to rally G7 partners in response to China’s export controls China and the US on Saturday agreed to conduct another round of trade negotiations in the coming week, as the world’s two biggest economies seek to avoid another damaging tit-for-tat tariff battle. Beijing last week announced sweeping controls on the critical rare earths industry, prompting US President Donald Trump to threaten 100 percent tariffs on imports from China in retaliation. Trump had also threatened to cancel his expected meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in South Korea later this month on the sidelines of the APEC summit. In the latest indication of efforts to resolve their dispute, Chinese state media reported that
RSS