TPP progress
Date Added: 14th December 2010 from ExportNZ
Catherine Beard, Executive Director ExportNZ, attended the stakeholder programme at the latest round of TPP negotiations in Auckland (6-10 December) and had some input into the discussions on how to craft agreements that take account of the issues facing small to medium enterprises and also how to think about integrated supply chains.
Meeting Overview…
Working groups met on:
- government procurement
- goods (textiles)
- competition policy
- investment
- sanitary and phytosanitary measures
- rules of origin
- cross-border trade in services and
- environment.
These groups completed their work and reported to chief negotiators at the end of the week. MFAT reports that Auckland has been something of a transitional round as negotiators in most areas have been assembling proposals and attempting to complete draft text that captures the positions of all the countries at the table. These drafts will be the raw material for the shift into a more intense negotiating phase that gets underway in 2011.
While there are still diverse positions on many issues across the agenda, good progress has been made in Auckland in developing and refining texts and improving understanding of the underlying policy issues.
A feature of the week’s work has been the progress made on ‘horizontal issues’ – a set of issues that lie at the heart of the group’s goal of making TPP an effective platform for regional integration. There has been strong technical input from industry experts on what a TPP agreement should offer to small and medium enterprises wanting to be part of the regional marketplace and from suppliers wanting to be niche suppliers in a regional production or supply chain.
This technical input from industry has also included some ideas on what TPP negotiations should be doing to improve coherence across the negotiating agenda. The plan is to take this conceptual discussion into a more practical format at future rounds.
Over the week, there has been a high level of interest from stakeholders. The stakeholders’ programme that has been operating alongside the negotiations throughout the week has provided opportunities for engagement with negotiators across issues as diverse as the depletion of fisheries resources, illegal logging, trade in environmental goods and services, geographical indications (a form of intellectual property), labour provisions in trade agreements, key issues for services trade, development goals and investment regulation. Over 100 stakeholders participated in this programme during the course of the week.
The New Zealand negotiating team will be assessing the results of the Auckland round in coming weeks and looking ahead to preparations for next year. In light of the high level of public and stakeholder interest evident in Auckland, part of that review will involve the question of consultative process for key issues in the TPP negotiating agenda for 2011. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s (MFAT) team would welcome further input from stakeholders on this point. This can be made either direct to team members or through MFAT’s website.
