Tag: TTIP

Consumer rights in trade agreements: a missing element?

In the past years, consumer organisations have worked intensively on the EU’s trade agreements with the US (TTIP) and Canada (CETA). We’ve stressed the advantages and challenges of these agreements and demanded that consumers benefit from them. For better or...

/ June 7, 2017

EU-US consumer groups want to change trade deals: split ‘tariffs’ from ‘rules’

If you work in policy communications, you’ll be familiar with the amount of technical terms and acronyms that come with conferences full of experts. You’ll know how difficult it can be to make things understandable and to cut out the...

/ April 5, 2017

Let’s Move Away from a Fossilised Vision of the Consumer Benefits of Trade

Last week, US and EU consumer groups joined in the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue met in Washington DC for their annual meeting. In this guest blog, Susan Grant, Director of Consumer Protection and Privacy, Consumer Federation of America, shares her impressions....

/ March 30, 2017

TTIP is hibernating. So let’s improve it.

At this point it’s perhaps a bit cliché to say it, but free trade is on shaky ground. Public support for trade liberalisation is waning, the Financial Times illustrated. This scepticism is very much highlighted by wrangling on a proposed...

and / November 25, 2016

Why privacy safeguards in trade deals need urgent improvement

The EU and 22 other countries are closing in on a huge deal to liberalise trade in services. One of the few pending issues in this Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) is the question of how to make sure trade...

/ October 20, 2016

Did TTIP push the EU to scrap precaution on endocrine disruptors?

Last month, the European Commission broke a promise it had made to you and all other EU citizens. The promise? That the EU will not trade away the ’precautionary principle’ to strike a trade deal with the United States (known...

/ July 14, 2016

Since when is TTIP not a BIG deal?

From “most important leak ever” to “much ado about nothing”, the analyses from different commentators of yesterday’s TTIP revelations couldn’t be wider-ranging. In a blog post, Trade commissioner Cecilia Malmström tried to soft-pedal the importance of the leaks by saying...

/ May 3, 2016

Whipping up a transatlantic trade agreement? Shop wisely.

The EU and US negotiators of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) meet in New York this week for the 13th round of negotiations. In the media storm that accompanies TTIP it is not easy to keep a bird’s-eye...

/ April 25, 2016

Will regulatory cooperation in TTIP become a straight-jacket for EU law making?

Regulatory cooperation might sound like a relatively benign and straightforward part of trade agreements. It is actually at the very core of TTIP, a trade deal being negotiated between the US and the EU which would be the world’s largest....

/ March 21, 2016

Lessons to learn from TPP: What the EU shouldn’t do in TTIP

What is TPP? TPP stands for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and it is the most important free trade agreement ever negotiated. It covers a vast number of sectors and involves 12 countries in the Pacific[1] region, including the United States (US)....

/ December 1, 2015