Obama to court SE Asia from increasingly extremist Malaysia
Malaysia’s government is battling against a smoking epidemic that threatens its young people — and it fears Barack Obama’s big Pacific trade deal will make the health crisis even worse.
When the president, a reformed smoker himself, lands in Kuala Lumpur this weekend for his third stop in a weeklong Asia swing, he’ll be visiting one of the other 12 Pacific Rim countries hoping to close the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade agreement that American and Asian businesses see as worth billions in sales into new markets.
But Malaysia is smarting that Obama’s negotiators won’t back the country’s efforts to take a strict anti-tobacco approach in the trade deal.
Malaysia’s fear is that it will suffer the same fate that Uruguay, Australia and Thailand have in other trade deals: dragged into an expensive, years-long international legal fight over its right to block cigarette companies from advertising.
When Malaysia’s trade negotiators have pushed to carve tobacco out of a section of the deal that would otherwise allow businesses to challenge whether a country’s laws and regulations meet its international trade obligations before an independent panel, the United States has balked and instead called for an approach that Malaysian officials believe would leave their country exposed.
“We are unhappy to say that we have no support from other countries” for exempting tobacco, and its manufacturers from the deal, Datuk Seri Mustapa Mohamed, Malaysia’s trade minister, said this week.
Smoking is a raging health problem in the Southeast Asian country of 30 million. Sixty percent of its 21- to 30-year-old population smokes, and nearly half of the country’s men average a steady diet of more than 11 cigarettes per day — all of which is running up a $900 million annual health care tab for smoking-related illnesses.
Obama’s visit to the country at least gives anti-smoking groups a chance to raise visibility around the issue and solicit help from the U.S. president.
“Today, 80 percent of the world’s smokers reside in the developing world, where the tobacco industry is focusing their business, using any excuse including free trade agreements to challenge legitimate government efforts to reduce tobacco use,” Dr. Molly Cheah, the head of the influential Malaysian Council for Tobacco Control, said in an open letter to Obama.
Cheah pled with Obama to make his visit “more significant” than the last time a U.S. president stopped in Malaysia — Lyndon B. Johnson, in 1966 — and “leave behind a legacy in tobacco control for the world.”
The dust-up over tobacco is also drawing broader attention from public health advocates and U.S. lawmakers who say it’s a crystal-clear example of why the trade deal should not give businesses the right to challenge countries’ laws at all. It ranks among the top complaints of Democrats whose opposition has already halted Obama’s trade agenda from advancing in Congress this year.
“All Americans should be concerned with ‘investor-state’ provisions in TPP that allow foreign corporations to mount trade challenges that weaken or dismantle public health or consumer protection laws,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said. “Nowhere is this threat clearer than with Big Tobacco and anti-smoking efforts, which is why TPP must explicitly prohibit trade challenges to anti-tobacco laws.”
Early in the deal’s negotiations, the United States was willing to give Malaysia something close to what it wanted, calling for a so-called safe harbor provision that protected anti-smoking rules. But under pressure from business groups and lawmakers, the Obama administration changed its mind in August.
In place of the earlier approach, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman has now offered a more nuanced tobacco proposal. It includes the standard trade deal language that allows countries to make rules to protect their citizens’ public health without running afoul of trade requirements, and it goes a step further by mentioning specifically that tobacco regulations are in fact covered under that regulation. Froman’s proposal also calls for countries’ health authorities to meet in case a challenge is filed against one participant’s tobacco laws.
“This proposal will, for the first time in a trade agreement, address specifically the public health issues surrounding tobacco” while avoiding the creation of “a precedent for excluding agricultural products,” Froman said when announcing the U.S. plan in August.
Source: Malaysia Chronicle
Published: 27 Apr 2014
Category: Top Story
