Transatlantic Trade Agreement (TTIP). Threat or opportunity for Europe;

EU negotiations and the United States for Trade and Investment Liberalization (TTIP) are moving slowly and secretly. The deal aims to create the largest trade union in the world, with a population of 850 million and covering about 50% of world trade. It is essentially an effort by the US and the EU. remove all barriers to trade between them and create a regulatory framework for the operation of companies that will be stronger than national laws and regulations.

In this way, globalization is enhanced, often bypassing the will of the sovereign states to legislate and implement national policies in specific areas related to the economy, health, employment, culture and elsewhere. This raises again the dominant question of the conflict between politics, democracy, national sovereignty and globalization.

There is intense concern, especially in EU countries, about the risks of such an agreement, which substantially strengthens the interests of large multinational corporations to the detriment of smaller corporations and European consumers.

The main objections and reservations that exist for the adoption of the TTIP agreement are the following:

• Settlement of disputes between governments and multinational corporations by supranational arbitration bodies (ISDSs) that will circumvent national law and national courts and that multinational corporations will seek redress in the interests of their interests under national law. Typical examples are Mexico’s € 66m compensation to the US company Cargill for legislating a new tax, Sri Laga, which was ordered to pay $ 60m to Deutsche Bank over an amendment to its oil contract. That is, a law or regulation that could harm the interests of a multinational will be judged not in national courts, but in a supranational arbitration mechanism.
• The overthrow of the European model for the State and the State, because it requires full liberalization of the market of services (health, education, public goods, etc.) in the private sector without any restrictions. This forced the Cameron government, after hundreds of thousands of Britons to protest, to pledge to safeguard and exclude the country’s National Health System from the negotiations!
• The weakening of workers’ rights. Harmonization of agreements into a minimum common denominator, and given that the United States has ratified only two of the International Labor Organization’s eight core labor protection conventions, leads to the conclusion that the transatlantic approach is tantamount to degrading workers’ rights.
• Simplification of technical standards and specifications can threaten food security because stricter rules apply in Europe. In particular, the “precautionary principle” applies, which prohibits the marketing of a product if there is a suspicion that it may cause harm to humans, while in the US it is required to prove conclusively that the product is harmful to withdraw from the market. In this context, the release of genetically modified products is a danger to Europe if the precautionary principle is abolished.
• The absence of sanctions against abuses related to the protection of the environment, the climate, the rural world, animal rights, and sustainable development in general is also a threat to the planet, as the new regulatory framework becomes much more relaxed and unclear. In particular, it does not have a dispute resolution mechanism and no possibility of punishing for violations as opposed to what is done for financial disputes between multinational companies and states as mentioned above.
• Especially for our country, the implementation of the transatlantic agreement poses great risks for Greek agricultural products and mainly for PDO (Protected Designations of Origin) and PGI (Protected Geographical Indications) products, because there will be the possibility of legally circulating imitations of these products. . Competition from countries that implement massive extensive and industrialized agricultural production as well as the relaxation of the regulatory framework that protects small quality production directly threatens not only Greek farmers, but also other farmers, mainly in the Mediterranean EU countries.

It seems that the EU-US talks on the transatlantic agreement, although to be completed by the end of 2015, will take a long time, will be difficult and complex, and of course the agreement will eventually have to be approved by the European Parliament and state parliaments. But because the interests of the citizens at stake are important, constant vigilance is required from the peoples of Europe, environmental organizations, trade unions, scientific bodies, in order to ensure the rights of peoples, not multinationals.

Nikolaos I. Giannoulis