Philippines warned anew against joining US-led TPP

The “contentious” Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), spearheaded by the United States “would undermine people’s rights and prevent national development,” local think tank IBON said as it urged the government to reconsider its plan to join it. 

The TPP was signed on Feb 11 in Auckland, New Zealand, by 12 countries amid protests across the region. Besides the US and New Zealand, the other members are Australia, Brunei, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. These countries account for at least 40 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) and 33 percent of global trade.

Critics are alarmed over the immense bias of the TPP for corporate interests and the vast coverage of economic areas that it wants to control, including allowing foreign corporations to invest in public utilities and social services, IBON said.

The Aquino administration has been aggressively seeking to make the Philippines a TPP member, IBON noted. In an apparent move to qualify for TPP membership, Congress rushed last week the approval of House Bill (HB) 6395 allowing lending firms, financing companies and investment houses in the country to be owned 100-percent by foreign nationals.

According to IBON, the approval of the bill was a result of the vigorous lobbying of the Joint Foreign Chambers of Commerce and the US Embassy.

But while US Ambassador to the Philippines Philip Goldberg lauded the passage of HB 6395, he said there were still obstacles to the country’s membership to the TPP, like the restrictions to foreign participation in land ownership enshrined in the 1987 Philippines Constitution.

Goldberg was apparently alluding to the possibility of a Charter change to remove the restrictions he cited in the 1987 Constitution. Observers think, however, that it was too late in the day for President Aquino to think about such a move, although he is known to be opposed to it. So the matter would have to wait for the next President.

“The country’s experience with unbridled liberalization makes the government’s bid to join the TPP extremely irrational,” IBON said. “The TPP is based on the obsolete and failed model of free-trade agreements that seriously challenge the country’s autonomy in pursuing real development. Government should, thus, resist the self-interested lobbying of foreign governments and transnational corporations.”

IBON first warned the government against joining the TPP in November, as the country prepared to host the summit of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) in Manila, where the US and China, both members of the organization, were expected to campaign for their respective free-trade initiatives—the TPP for the US and the Free-Trade Agreements and Regional Trading Agreements (FTAAP) for China. IBON had warned the Philippines then against joining either, saying membership in either would only aggravate the country’s sinking production.

IBON said it was bad enough that the Philippines had joined Apec, as its steady implementation of Apec-prompted trade liberalization had already pushed tariff levels down, eroding food sufficiency and overall domestic production.

The TPP is expected to eliminate tariffs further on thousands of goods and services and impose stricter rules on intellectual-property rights as well as the supremacy of investor over state interest.