[CTC] Pope's visit highlights wary church view on TPP, TTIP

Wed Sep 23 08:29:27 PDT 2015

Pope's visit highlights wary church view on TPP, TTIP

By Doug Palmer 
POLITICO
09/23/2015 05:00AM EDT

Pope Francis helped broker President Barack Obama's historic opening to Cuba, one of the biggest changes in U.S. trade policies in years. But the Catholic Church has concerns about another potential element of Obama's trade legacy: the Trans-Pacific Partnership pact. 

The pope and the president may not even touch on the subject when they meet at the White House on Wednesday and Francis likely will focus on broader themes of social justice in his speech to Congress on on Thursday. But the Vatican has previously expressed reservations about both the TPP talks between the United States and 11 Asia-Pacific countries and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership talks between the United States and the European Union.

By "entering a regional trade agreement, a country reduces the incentives to extend its efforts on trade liberalization at a multilateral level," the Holy See's envoy to the World Trade Organization Archbishop Silvano Tomasi said <http://go.politicoemail.com/?qs=97e8fd27f5a8e08fe0602d1f1753812f21bdf00e6d618b14a1fe6d3e852f9bb0> in December 2013. "Most importantly, we know that only the multilateral system is a clear, equitable system that provides effective guarantees for small and poor countries."

In other words, Tomasi argued, regional free-trade agreements hurt poor countries excluded from the pacts since they don't share in the new trading opportunities. They also undermine the incentive for big countries, like the United States, to engage in negotiations at the WTO, where all 161 member nations would share in the benefits. 

That's a timely issue because of next week's United Nations Sustainable Development Summit aimed at eliminating poverty and hunger by 2030. Francis will attend along with Obama, a host of other world leaders and WTO Director General Roberto Azevedo.

Tomasi also expressed concern about the asymmetric power of rich countries to negotiate regional free trade pacts, touching on two hot-button issues involving protections for pharmaceutical patents and protections for business investors.

"Among the most damaging concessions developing countries make in regional and bilateral agreements are those enhancing the monopolies on life-saving medicines, which reduce access and affordability, and those that provide excessive legal rights to foreign investors, limiting the policy space for nations to promote sustainable and inclusive development," he said.

Francis himself has been critical of what he calls the "deification of the market" - the idea that the economy works best when there is no government intervention and that free markets will eventually benefit everyone, including society's lowliest members.

"Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world," Francis said in one of his early papal documents. "This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system."

Still, the Catholic Church is not anti-trade or anti-globalization, as comes through in Tomasi's praise for an agreement reached by WTO members in Bali in 2013 to make it cheaper and easier to move goods across borders by reducing red tape, streamlining operations and updating procedures. 

"Both developed and developing countries would benefit, and the gains will be larger for the latter," the Apostolic Nuncio said.

THE POPE AND THE WTO
Francis, an Argentinian, became the first Latin American pope in 2013 just six months before Azevedo, a Brazilian, became the first Latin American director general of the WTO.

The two men met in May 2014, when Azevedo was in Rome for the United Nations' chief executive board meeting. They bantered a bit over their love of soccer. Two months later, both their national teams were defeated by Germany in the World Cup - Brazil in a humiliating 7-1 loss and Argentina 1-0 in extra time in the finals. 

Azevedo is also in Washington this week and will be giving a speech at a think tank on Thursday morning. The event is scheduled to begin more or less at the same time that Francis will be wrapping up his remarks to Congress.

At their meeting in the Vatican, Azevedo invited Francis to speak at the WTO's October 2014 public forum on "why trade matters to everyone." The pope did not attend, but sent an emissary to read a speech written on his behalf by Cardinal Peter Turkson, a Ghanaian who is president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and regarded by some as a possible future pope.

Those remarks begin by paying tribute to the central role trade has played in human development.

"Like music, it is one of the great international languages," Turkson said  <http://go.politicoemail.com/?qs=97e8fd27f5a8e08f309cd24625c38ff2de7fdeb44037a107440c243c98ecabc4>. "In our globalizing world, benefits surely flow from a more open trading environment: economic growth, innovation, employment opportunities, cultural enrichment. Trade can be an agent for development."

But Turkson's tone turns dark, focusing on the uglier side of international business in which large corporations "cut corners, avoid paying taxes and discard workers rather than supporting the ability of the poor and marginalized to earn a decent living and live in dignity." 

"[Trade] can not be defended when it runs roughshod over basic human rights, refusing to hear the cries of the poor who toil long hours for scandalously low pay in unsafe working conditions," Turkson said. "It can not be defended when it treats the natural environment as yet another resource to be plundered, rather than a precious gift to be stewarded prudently and wisely, including with self restraint."

Having delivered the jeremiad, Turkson concludes the remarks with a call to action. "The WTO," he said, "has an important role in forging a fairer system of international trade, one that puts service ahead of mastery."

In that vein, Obama and other world leaders will endorse a plan <http://go.politicoemail.com/?qs=97e8fd27f5a8e08f1f409512e8ab50a4f983deb614dbfe6c2ffd6a9efcac743b> at the upcoming U.N. Sustainable Development Summit that, among many other ambitious goals, calls for the successful conclusion of world trade talks launched 14 year years ago in Doha, Qatar.

But any deal reached at the WTO's upcoming ministerial meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, in December, is likely to be a shadow of the ambitious package envisioned in 2001, which sought to aggressively cut tariffs and farm subsidies to help poor countries prosper through trade. 

Worse yet, there could be no deal at all, further eroding confidence in the WTO and providing further momentum for regional trade agreements like the TPP and TTIP.

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