The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a trade agreement, currently in negotiations, which if passed will encompass more than 40 percent of the global GDP. Although every person on the Pacific Rim — including Americans — will be affected by it, the planning has been done in near secrecy by 12 countries — the United States, Japan, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Chile, Singapore, Peru, Vietnam, New Zealand and Brunei. China and Korea announced interest in joining, but have not yet become full negotiating partners. A few other countries may join after the initial negotiations, including Taiwan, the Phillippines, Laos, Colombia, and Indonesia. Cambodia, Bangladesh, and India may also join at a later date.

The general public has no access to the developing agreement. Governments have limited access to it. However, major corporations have greater access, and they are able to lobby for and against portions of the text.

What little information we have about the proposed trade agreement is coming from a few participants of various meetings who are leaking the information, usually months afterward.

A new version, dating from May of this year, was leaked this week, and although there have been a few changes, especially in the realm of intellectual property rights, the environment, and medicine and drug rules, it appears that negotiations are stalling.

In the new version, there are industry-favoring additions with relation to pharmaceuticals and patents, which if enacted will very likely limit access to important medications in the developing world, and weaken requirements to patent genes in plants, which will negatively affect small and organic farmers and boost large agribusiness companies like Monsanto.

For northern New England, that would be a real blow. Vermont has already established rules requiring genetically modified foods to be labeled in that state, and Maine also has a law on the books that such a thing will take place if five contiguous states adopt the measure. So far, Maine, Vermont, and Connecticut have agreed. Massachusetts is considering the measure again in the next legislative session. New Hampshire voted down its bill this year, but may have better luck if the state is the odd man out in the next session. In Rhode Island, 81 percent of the population wants GMOs to be labeled, so the legislature, which toyed with the idea this year, may bring it back.

However, all of these bills will mean nothing if the TPP, and its Atlantic sister, the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, is finally enacted. TAFTA calls for a “harmonizing” of standards, and may mean that the higher European standards may prevail or that the lower American standards will carry the day on the issue.

No matter what happens with the GMO issue in particular, what each of these trade agreements will do is remove national, state and local control from virtually every issue, from labor standards to environmental standards to contaminants in food or drinking water. In almost every case, the lower third-world standards are expected to prevail. Indeed, there is concern that in order to bring China into the treaty — an essential step, because China this week surpassed the United States as the world’s largest economy — the U.S., Japan, Canada, and other nations are going to have to make even more concessions, most of which aren’t good for consumers, labor markets, privacy concerns, public health, or the environment.

The U.S. pushed hard for a resolution to TPP this year, but it doesn’t look like they’re going to get it. There are simply too many moving parts to the treaty, and little in the way of consensus.

For example, opposition is increasing to remove a provision advanced by the U.S. and Japan that would require the granting of a new patent for drugs that are substantially the same as old ones with a slight modification to keep the patent alive indefinitely. This process is called “evergreening”. Pharmaceutical companies like it because it keeps the cost of drugs high well beyond the period that would pay back any research and development costs. However, the practice would effectively shut out poorer countries from getting cancer and other important drugs that are coming off patent protection.

Another issue that is raising concern is how the TPP would affect internet privacy and create censorship. One of the groups that has mobilized against the TPP on behalf of internet freedom is a group called “Fight for the Future”, which rallied opposition in the U.S. to the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, culminating in its defeat in 2012. Since then, SOPA has become synonymous with copyright excesses.

Fight for the Future says that the TPP will do many of the same things SOPA would have done, including internet blacklisting. While that’s apparently not true, at least according to the most recent leak of the treaty, the TPP would export some of the worst aspects of American copyright law. Among those is the criminalization of noncommercial file sharing, which has the potential to make any Facebook user who innocently shares a cat video a criminal.

A lot of the confusion could be ended by making the process more transparent. Unfortunately, no one has any interest in allowing anything approaching a democratic approach to creating a global treaty that will affect almost every man, woman and child on the planet. While that may be understandable — if they can’t even get 12 secretaries and ministers to agree to terms, imagine opening it up to the general public — it is still something we need to be informed about, and if necessary, speak out against.