By Floyd Gaibler, USGC Director of Trade Policy

The 12th round of formal Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations was completed in Dallas last week. U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk reported that progress was made in advancing the 20 chapters of the agreement. Progress was reported in several areas: cross-cutting trade issues such as regulatory coherence, the interests of small and medium-sized businesses, the deepening of regional supply chains, and promoting development. They continued work on developing ambitious tariff packages on industrial goods, agricultural and textile markets.

Nineteen industry groups, including the U.S. Grains Council, distributed a two-page position paper that detailed recommendations for the TPP chapter on sanitary and phytosanitary measures to expand on WTO to promote trade-facilitating measures such as equivalence, transparency, recognition of inspection systems and harmonization of export certificates. The groups also recommended that these new obligations be subject to binding dispute settlement.

Officials continue to say that any decision on allowing Canada, Mexico and Japan to join the talks would require ministerial consensus and would depend on the potential new participants demonstrating they share the ambition of existing members. Further discussions on whether the three countries can join the talks will occur at a June meeting of TPP ministers on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Kazan, Russia, which will be an opportunity for ministers to take stock of the TPP talks. At the same time, several countries, including Korea and the Philippines, have expressed interest in the negotiations and are considering joining TPP after the initial agreement is reached.

The next formal round of negotiations is scheduled in early July in San Diego, Calif. While the goal is to complete the negotiations by the end of the year, TPP members have noted that the focus is achieving a high quality agreement as the primary objective.