Free trade agreements are supposed to maximise the flow of goods and services and minimise tariff barriers. In many ways, such structures create a unified economy across national borders: often described as signifiers of capitalist utopia. The reality, however, is much too untidy. Removal of tariffs has unequal fallouts. It expands the market for some and restricts it for others. Consider, for instance, the latest free trade arrangement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), drawn up by the United States, Canada, Mexico, Peru and Chile, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and Singapore. Under this new arrangement, Japan will have to open its highly protected agricultural market even more than it has already done. Further, it will be obligated to import an additional 78,400 tonnes of rice from Australia and the US. This is not good news for Japanese farmers. On the other hand, Japanese automakers are happy that they would not have to pay any tariff for selling cars and ancillary parts in the US. 

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Similarly, the intellectual property rights provisions are likely to benefit the US corporations, especially pharmaceutical majors while adversely impacting countries like Peru and Vietnam with regard to high-priced medicines directly derived from living organisms called ‘biologics’. The pharmaceutical companies will get 12 years protection even after the expiry of the patent deadline. These are just some of the many problems that are masked by the rhetoric of free-trade-benefit-for-all. There is a price to be paid. And some countries will surely end up paying more than others. The text of the TPP will be placed in the public domain months from now. And only then can the fine print be read and understood. 

The more interesting aspect of the TPP is the time — almost a decade — that it has taken the US to get the agreement to materialise. The work is not yet done. The legislatures of TPP member countries will now have to ratify it. It remains a tough task for President Barack Obama to push it through in the US Congress. If the Congress does not take it up for ratification on its own, Obama does have the discretionary power to notify that he is going to sign the document. The Congress then has 90 days’ time for ratifying the agreement. The question being debated in the US media and political circles is whether the TPP is good enough for America. That is a question the Americans will have to decide for themselves. The tacit argument that Obama and his aides are putting forward is that the trade pact will make the US a stronger trading country in the Pacific Rim region. Arguably, this is an argument to support the continued US economic domination in the region. 

But analysed from the point of view of the Asia Pacific region, the TPP looks like an interloper. The Asia Pacific Economic Forum (APEC), which has grown from the initial 12 members in 1989 to 21 members, at its summit meeting in Beijing in 2014, has already affirmed its determination to translate the vision of the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP) into reality. The TPP, of course, is unlikely to remain an exclusive club and could expand to include other countries in the region. Though initially apprehensive of the TPP, China now appears to be convinced that the arrangement does not pose a real challenge for it. Beijing may even join TPP at a later point. It is to be expected that the TPP would soon absorb the rest of the APEC members. But the basic question as to how beneficial such free trade agreements are for the member-countries continues to be an open-ended one. What the experience of the European Union (EU) in fact shows is that such that economic arrangements can turn out to be messier than anticipated.