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Business Matters: Trans-Pacific Free Trade Deal is Agreed

Trans-Pacific Free Trade Deal is Agreed

06/10/2015 GMT

BBC World Service - Business Matters, Trans-Pacific Free Trade Deal is Agreed

Twelve countries have signed the world's biggest ever trade deal

Twelve countries including the US and Japan have signed a sweeping new trade deal affecting 40% of the global economy.

The world's biggest ever trade deal has been signed into existence. The Trans-Pacific Partnership cuts trade tariffs and sets common standards in trade for 12 Pacific rim countries, including the US and Japan. Forty per cent of the global economy will be organised into one massive free-trade zone. Supporters say it could be worth billions of dollars to the countries involved but critics say it was negotiated in secret and is biased towards corporations. Business Matters speaks to Bill Watson, a trade policy analyst at the Cato Institute on the significance of the deal. We also hear a range of views including those of Philip Ellis, a cattle rancher from Wyoming who supports the deal, and Polly Jones from campaign group Global Justice Now who believes it will favour big agribusiness over small farmers.

The British energy company BP will now have to pay $20.8 billion to settle all civil claims for damages following the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil disaster. The deal involved the US Justice Department and five coastal states, including Louisiana which is expecting to receive a minimum of $6.8 billion. Kyle Graham, executive director of the state's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, tells Business Matters what it would be spent on.

Edward Snowden is certainly a man who divides opinion. Many around the world call the former analyst for America's giant electronic spy agency, the NSA, a hero for leaking secret intelligence documents on a scale never seen before. Others call him a traitor - for exactly the same reason. Some of the secrets he has revealed were lifted from the UK government surveillance agency based at the Government Communications Headquarters. Snowden is now a fugitive in Russia. We hear part of his first British television interview, given to the BBC's Panorama programme.

All this and more discussed with our guests from both sides of the Pacific - David Kuo of the Motley Fool in Singapore and the radical activist Jose Martin in New York.

(Photo: US Trade Representative Michael Froman is flanked by international counterparts after an agreement was reached by 12 Trans-Pacific Partnership member countries, in Atlanta, Georgia. Credit: EPA)

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