 We are here in Bangkok where negotiators from 16 countries are meeting at the 23rd round of negotiations for the regional comprehensive economic partnership and several groups are here in Bangkok monitoring the trade round. We joined here by Joseph Poruginan from Focus on the Global South and Susanna Baria from Public Services International. Welcome to NewsClick and People's Dispatch. Let me start with you Joseph. The RCEP round is happening at a time when global trade deals seem to be in a crisis and many countries seem to be withdrawing from trade deals. You see it with the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Why is it that the RCEP continues to be in negotiation mode and what is it hold for Asia? We need to I think situate the RCEP talks in the broader context. We feel there's a geopolitical dimension to these negotiations of this mega FTA negotiations because on the one hand you have RCEP, 16 countries centered around ASEAN and it's developing partners, China, India, Australia, New Zealand. But we also seeing like the negotiations for Trans-Pacific Partnership which is US-led, many fields US-led. And then the EU is also pushing for its own model of free trade agreement. So if you look at it from that geopolitical lens you see that there's a battle going on among the main major superpowers for who gets to define the trade rules. So RCEP for a while it was viewed as a China-led agreement because it's a way to counterbalance the transatlantic US and EU influence in the region. But as we've seen countries like Japan and Korea that are also negotiating as part of TPP have in fact pushed the agenda for an ambitious agenda more aggressively in this talk. Why is it important? Like I said Asia is at the center of these negotiations and I think there are at least three reasons why Asia is at the center. One is that it's a fast-growing region. It's a big market and I think the motivations you have to go back to the financial crisis. The developed countries are looking for ways to expand the market, new markets. And so they're driven by that the need to export more to a region that is growing. Countries like Laos, Cambodia, Philippines are growing at a fast pace, 6%, 7%. So there's that interest to capture that Asian market. Second reason I think is access of resources. So part of that struggle among the superpowers is who gets to access the resources. And this question of resources is vital to the competitiveness of these big powers. The EU says that its competitiveness is hinged on its ability to secure cheaper raw materials. So and these deals facilitate that access to raw materials. And the third reason is China. I think there's a US pivot to Asia that is in the military sense, but there's also an economic pivot. And part of that is really to how to counterbalance the increasing influence of China in the region. So I think those three issues are really what's motivating this negotiation. Like Joseph said, it's 16 countries, some of them developed, some of them developing. The negotiations have been going on for the last five years, 23 chapters. Can you highlight some of the concerns in terms of your organization? So from the perspective of PSI, one of the big concerns we have is obviously how it's going to impact labor and workers in the region. And we feel that many provisions, many aspects of what is there in the proposal for an RCEP are going to impact employment, either because they are going to be more important because of floor tariffs that will lead to job losses, or because by losing certain policy tools, again, tariff itself is a policy tool, but also through how we're having constraints on the kind of request what can make on investment when there are foreign direct investment coming, this will have an impact also on the ability to create employment in the future. So these are very valid concerns in a context where there is a crisis of employment in many of the countries in the region. Another concern is also the impact it can have on wages. When there is more competition, then very often companies see reducing the wage, wages of workers as a way to decrease the cost. So more competition will create a push to the bottom. Informalization is another consequence because there is more use, there is a possibility of more use of contract work. We are also worried that it will have an impact on people's ability to access public services. In the region already governments are not putting enough money in public services so that we can have good quality healthcare, good quality electricity provided for everyone. There is also different places where water is being privatized. And the parts of the agreements that are related, for instance, to services, make it much more difficult to regulate the private sector, make that one cannot reverse a privatization that has taken place. And that is really worrying because we have seen that many often privatization has failed. It's failed in the ability to provide services to people who need them. And there are lots of constraints on how governments can regulate in terms of being able to promote the public interest. And that's a very important concern also. And overall I think the concern is that it's the package that the agreement provides that has a direction, a clear intent to ensure that governments cannot regulate investments and that want to guarantee rights and profits for companies. Talking about regulation, one of the more controversial elements, especially in the recent trend of mega-FTAs, has been the investment chapter. And many countries within RCEP have been backtracking on investment rules. What is the status of the investment chapter and what are your concerns on it? Yeah, RCEP is a new generation FTA, which means that it's not just dealing, we're not dealing here with simple elimination of tariffs or market access issues. And one of the more contentious, as you said, is investments. And there are at least two big issues under that. One is the prohibition of performance requirements. So performance requirements, as you know, like local content policy, local labor policy, these are used by governments as a policy instrument to push national development. But these agreements would limit the power of, would actually prevent governments from using these policy tools. The second is, consider the toxic element of this agreement is the investor-state dispute settlement, which gives power to corporations to sue governments in undemocratic and non-transparent investment tribunals. And so we feel that the investment chapter really reflects the corporate agenda that is underpinning this talk. But if I may add on the concerns, Benny, for ASEAN, a big concern is the asymmetry in development. So we're negotiating, these are 16 countries negotiating. China is, of course, a very powerful country. But you have countries like, at least developed countries like Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia, who are the economies, the national income of these countries are less than 1% of that of China. And so there's a big concern that who would benefit from this agreement? Will this agreement be able to pull up the economies of these least developed countries? Or will the interest of richer countries like China, Australia, Singapore be the one that dictating the agenda of this negotiation? So that asymmetry is an important concern. There's also a concern over intellectual property rights and its impact on medicines and public health. There are provisions in the intellectual property rights chapter that are DRIPS Plus provisions that would, the fear is that these provisions would actually delay the availability of cheaper or more affordable generic medicines. So, and there's also part of the IPR concerns also have to deal with farmers and farmers' rights to cultivate seeds because the one implication of signing on to this agreement with its IPR provision is that countries are forced to actually comply with UPOV 91, which is a plant variety protection legislation that many farmers have said would really restrict the ability of farmers and farmers' rights over not just seed but their whole production. So if you say that peasants are not going to benefit, patients are not going to benefit, the LBCs are not going to benefit, can you both speak a bit about who's driving the negotiations, especially within the bigger countries, which are the key sort of corporate actors that are trying to push the asset forward. So linking these questions also with the question of concerns, one of the things we have seen is that the negotiations of the agreement have been held in secrecy and that the texts of the negotiations, the content, the positions of countries have not been put in the public, have not been shared with elected representatives, have not been shared also with, for instance, trade unions, which are representatives that generally have tripartite mechanisms in which government discuss important issues, but this agreement, despite its impact on labor, is not part of those tripartite spaces. And this is a serious concern that raises the question of whose interests are being promoted. And we can see that there is a certain group that has been having direct and privileged access to the negotiators and these are the big corporations in the region. They are companies, for instance, in the daily sector in Australia that has been quite involved, companies in the pharmaceutical sector from Japan. So as what Susanna said, I think the main drivers really are the big corporations and the big corporate lobby who have been given privileged access to these negotiations. So large big-scale mining companies, agribusiness companies, big pharma, these are the companies that are really driving the negotiations, in fact influencing the direction of the talks. And so they stand to benefit the most, I think. Thank you for speaking to NewsClick and People Dispatch. That's all the time we have and we hope to come back to you at some point to look at what the status of we are separate. Thank you.