:: Across the board ::

This section contains news and analysis of sweeping developments that affect the overall push and pull towards FTAs and bilateral investment treaties. This means major trends relating to bilateralism, often with global consequences, and other cross-cutting issues. New developments arising from US politics, the WTO or South-South alliance-building, for instance, are often reported here as they tend to have systemic impacts.

last update: May 2012

The corporate free trade project reloaded

27-Aug-2014 TeleSur

Twenty years after NAFTA, the US and EU are making a renewed push for global free trade. But today the South is better able to resist such a project.

War of the FTAs

20-Aug-2014 Business World

As an exhausted World Trade Organisation struggles, expect a war of FTAs as rich countries hit back with new trade regimes under TPP and TTIP while emerging markets build the RCEP

New World Trade Order? Fighting TPP and TTIP/TAFTA

8-Aug-2014 Post Gobalisation Initiative

At the Left Forum 2014, one of the RLS-NYC panels discussed the trade agreements that are currently being negotiated: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP, or TAFTA).

An urgent challenge for the BDS movement

5-Aug-2014 Socialist Worker

On July 10, the Palestinian BDS National Committee issued a call: "We urge people of conscience to intensify their pressure on governments to impose a military embargo on Israel and to suspend free trade and bilateral agreements with it until it fulfills its obligations under international law."

International trade partnerships: Deal or no deal?

3-Aug-2014 Oxford Analytica

Obstacles in several countries could delay the negotiations of TPP and TTIP — and possibly scupper the deals entirely, says Oxford Analytica. Infographic.

Joseph Stiglitz warns on ‘free’ trade deals

9-Jul-2014 Finance News Network

"I think all countries that are a part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade agreement ought to worry," says former World Bank Chief Economist and Nobel Prize Winner, Professor Joseph Stiglitz

Trans-Pacific free-trade pact 'old-fashioned': ex-WTO chief

28-May-2014 AFP

Former WTO chief Pascal Lamy calls the Trans-Pacific Partnership "the last of the big old-style trade agreements" while ''the new era begins with the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.''

No to trade deals that threaten democracy!

21-May-2014 IUF

A new publication from the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF) exposes the corporate power grab at the core of two mega-treaties: TPP and TTIP

Imperialism and the new free trade deals

23-Apr-2014 In defence of marxism

Far from being a means to open up the world to a further intensification of trade, TPP and TTIP will carve up the world into two or more power blocs waging economic war with one another.

Jon Weissman: A free trade pact’s sorry numbers

28-Mar-2014 Gazette Net

New evidence of the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement’s damaging record provides the latest reason why Congress should not delegate away its constitutional trade authority and allow the Trans-Pacific Partnership to be “fast-tracked” into place.

:: Across the board ::

Referenced sites

21st Century Trade Agreements: Implications for Long-Run Development Policy

#A18DoA - Global day of action to defeat free trade and investment treaties

Alianza Social Continental

ICC

Movimientos.org

Pambazuka

People over profit

Peoples Global Action

Regional/Multilateral Integration Agreements

SOMO

South Centre

Stop fast track!

ISDS Case Map