[CTC] TPP Text Needs Further Work After Japan

[Arthur Stamoulis]

Inside US Trade

TPP Text Needs Further Work After Japan; Release Not Expected For Weeks

Posted: October 29, 2015

Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) officials will not be able to finalize the
text of the agreement by Oct. 30, when a drafting and legal scrub session
is slated to wrap up in Tokyo, meaning the release of the final text is
still several weeks away, according to informed sources.

Two U.S. industry sources said they expect the release will not happen
until around the Nov. 26 Thanksgiving holiday or later, although a source
close to the negotiations said he believed the release would happen before
then.

Felipe Lopeandia, Chile's chief negotiator for TPP, was non-committal on
the timing of the text release in an Oct. 22 briefing for Chilean
stakeholders. “Our interest is that these [texts] be published as soon as
possible and we are working so that happens within the coming weeks,” he
said, according to an Oct. 22 press release from Direcon, Chile's trade
agency.

One source close to the negotiations said he expects TPP countries to hold
another meeting soon to continue work on the text, but that no date has
been set yet. In the meantime, TPP officials will continue working to
finalize the text through electronic communication, this source said.

Several sources said the work to finalize the TPP text is time-consuming
and taking longer than expected, although they differed on the reasons.
Some said translation problems have occurred with respect to Vietnam.

One informed source said additional complications have come up because some
TPP countries are only now becoming aware of the substantive commitments
that were agreed bilaterally between other parties and that is creating
some discontent. At the Atlanta TPP ministerial, all countries provided to
all 12 parties a list of the side letters they had negotiated bilaterally,
but did not share the letters themselves.

An industry source said officials were also running into cases where TPP
parties had slightly different understandings about the deals that were
actually cut, on top of less substantive problems like mistakes in the
text. But he characterized both types of issues as the “usual snafus."

The source close to the negotiations downplayed suggestions by U.S.
officials that the change in government in Canada poses a further delay to
efforts to release the text as the incoming Liberal Party needs to time to
review the agreement that was reached. Instead, this source said he did not
view the Canadian issue as a “problem.”

U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman earlier this week said Canadian
trade bureaucrats have been briefing the newly elected Liberal government
on the contents of the TPP agreement, but stopped short of saying whether
the change in government would delay the release of the TPP text.

U.S. companies and business groups are still withholding judgment on the
TPP until they see the final text, possibly in the hope of still being able
to persuade USTR to make marginal improvements. But USTR has begun to
schedule briefings for next week for business representatives who are not
cleared advisers, although it is not clear to what extent these briefings
will provide detailed information on the deal.

At least one formal advisory committee has already held a meeting to
discuss its forthcoming report on the TPP deal that must be completed 30
days after the president notified Congress of his intent to sign the deal.
This meeting is an administrative step required under the relevant statute
establishing the advisory committees, freeing the committee to actually
write the report once the text is available.

Arthur Stamoulis
Citizens Trade Campaign
(202) 494-8826
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