Beyond Nafta 2.0

But in the current era of hyper-globalization, trade agreements have shown little regard for the planet’s environmental boundaries, the needs of workers and the poor, and society as a whole. [...] Their core “free” trade principles of national treatment and “most favored nation” — intended both to prevent states from discriminating between domestic and multinational investment, and to provide investors and corporations with the best treatment available in any trade agreement — act as serious obstacles to the protection of the environment and public health, and to the industrial strategies o [...] The ISDS system, entrenched in more than 3,000 bilateral investment treaties and free trade agreements, gives foreign investors powerful tools to undermine the authority of governments, courts, and human rights bodies to protect the environment and the public interest. [...] They objected, for example, to the fact that TRIPS provided certain policy flexibilities that “can be used to mitigate the detrimental impact of the Agreement’s provisions on market dynamics and access to medicines.”25 Over the next two decades, the US government and corporate lobbyists, turned to bilateral and regional FTAs to advance their agenda, contributing to what a 2011 joint declaration by [...] Data protection refers to the ability of brand-name companies to deny competitors access to the results of the clinical and test data that compan- ies must provide to health regulators in order to gain marketing approval.