The Trans-Pacific Partnership: Impact on Global Health

The following is a guest post by my colleague Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a regional trade and investment agreement currently being negotiated by twelve countries representing 40 percent of global GDP, has pushed to the surface old and new questions about the complex relationship between trade and global health. Will intellectual property provisions included in the treaty hinder, as the skeptics fear, developing countries’ access to safe and more affordable drugs? To what extent will the investment provisions (known as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS) open doors for private firms to challenge the sovereign rights of national governments to regulate in favor of public health? What should the United States do to advance special rules for certain industries and foster innovation without undermining public health standards of citizens in all signatory nations?

In this next installment of The Internationalist podcast series, CFR Senior Fellow for Global Health Yanzhong Huang speaks with Suerie Moon, research director and co-chair of the Forum on Global Governance for Health at the Harvard Global Health Institute. Listen in to hear Moon’s important insight into the potential dangers to global health governance contained in the current TPP agreement and how she thinks those pitfalls can and should be avoided.