Editorial: TPP trade pact off to a solid start

It has settled on some principles and conventions covering everything from trade in goods and services to international copyright and investment.

Failure in multi-country trade talks used to be unthinkable. Negotiators would be in grim deadlock until the last minute, when they would cobble something together because failure seemed worse for the world than an empty deal.

That view disappeared during the Doha Round of negotiations under the World Trade Organisation about 10 years ago. After Doha fizzled, failure became all too possible for negotiations that were similarly ambitious in the range of issues they tackled.

For that reason alone, the agreement reached early yesterday by the 12 countries of the Trans-Pacific Partnership is notable. The details have yet to be fully disclosed and doubtless will provide plenty of debate, but the outcome in Atlanta should not be underestimated.

It has settled on some principles and conventions covering everything from trade in goods and services to international copyright and investment. These are now likely to become the benchmark for commercial law worldwide.

Europe is bound to want to revive its discussions of a Trans-Atlantic Partnership with the US to match the TPP, and pressure will come back on the WTO from countries that feel excluded from pacts of the prosperous.

No country should feel excluded. If the final agreement has been true to its first principles it will be open to any country that can adopt its rules and standards. That should, in time, include China.

Though the prospect of a rival agreement embracing China has probably helped the Obama Administration overcome opposition to TPP in the United States, its exclusion is unlikely to be permanent.

The US opposed China's admission to the WTO, too, but eventually came around.

As it is, the TPP covers 40 per cent of the world economy. It brings New Zealand's first comprehensive trade agreement with the US, Japan, Canada, Mexico and Peru. It is due reward for resisting the kind of one-sided "free-trade agreement" made by Australia with the US.

Dairy products might not have gained much easier access to Japan and North America but agricultural exports are firmly in the agreement. The meat and horticulture industries look forward to reductions in tariffs they paid to TPP countries last year.

If the gains are not as great as once hoped, the TPP partners appear to have given way less to the US than many feared on issues of patents and copyright, especially for pharmaceuticals.

Pharmac's role and bargaining power is unchanged. The 20-year patent on new drugs is unchanged, as is the five-year data exclusivity for biological medicines.

Intellectual property issues for other industries are just as important, particularly information and communications technology (ICT). US patent law can be too restrictive on innovation and the TPP agreement will need close scrutiny on that score.

The rights it gives investors to sue government will also be contentious, as will the new $200 million threshold for land purchases to need Overseas Investment Office approval if the buyer is based in a TPP country.

But at least there is now something tangible to discuss. Critics of TPP can no longer raise spectral fears of the unknown. The deal is open for debate.