Pros And Cons Of Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)

863 Words4 Pages

Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a trade agreement between 12 influencing countries, which are United States, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. Together, these countries make up 40% of the world's total GDP as well as 26% of the world trade, meaning that the pact will affect approximately 40% of the world’s economy. The agreement is believed to open markets, set high-standard trade rules, and address 21st century issues in the global economy. It includes 30 chapters regarding trade and trade-related issues, including trade in goods, e-commerce and telecommunications, intellectual property rights, and many more. The TPP itself has been negotiated 'secretly' for …show more content…

The TPP allows large pharmaceutical firms to set their medicine prices sovereignly and restricts the availability of low-cost generic drugs in the countries. Therefore, patients are forced to buy the expensive medications provided by those pharmaceutical firms. This will be a crucial problem, especially in developing nations, whose people would not be able to buy these expensive drugs. This can be considered inhumane as it disables people from getting a proper medication when they are sick. With this regulation, sick people would only get sicker because they can’t afford the medications. Moreover, this accord also forces Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to monitor the users’ activities in the Internet. TPP requires the Internet intermediaries to filter all communications in the Internet for potentially copyright-infringing materials and disclose their customers’ identity to IP rights-holders. This basically means that the ISP will be spying on their users and give away their users’ identities along with their private data, meaning the customers’ privacy are not safe anymore. The Internet users can’t post their ideas freely in the Internet anymore, as only sharing a link to a social media might already be considered as a copyright infringement act. Then, some websites such as Youtube or Facebook might also be in trouble because of this regulation. In this case, TPP is both morally and humanely wrong as it takes away people’s rights and freedom of expression, which is something that a human being should have in order to live righteously. Therefore, it is clear that TPP gives numerous downsides to the corresponding