Dr Mary Assunta, Senior policy advisor of the Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance (SEATCA) said, “Tobacco is NOT like any other product.  It kills half of its users, prematurely.  Tobacco is the only consumer product for which there is a global treaty which set international standards for its regulation and the treaty warns Parties to protect their public health policies from the tobacco industry.”

Assunta was referring to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC), to which almost all members of the ASEAN are signatories and obligated to reduce tobacco use. The WHO FCTC Article 2.2 says Parties entering into new agreements that may cover tobacco products require that these be “compatible with their obligations under the Convention and its protocols. Additionally Article 5.3 Guidelines, Recommendation 7.1 says the tobacco industry must not be given any incentives to run its business. Hence the TPPA, a new agreement, should reflect this clause.”

Tobacco products should be strictly regulated according to the FCTC and the TPP should not give the tobacco industry opportunities to increase its business or the ability to sue governments at the expense of people’s lives. The TPP should not apply to tobacco products.

“The objective of free trade agreements (FTAs) is market competition that increases product availability and diversity and reduce prices to the consumer,” Assunta acknowledged. “However, these goals are inappropriate for tobacco, as they would result in considerable harm to health. When it comes to tobacco products, ‘cheaper’ and ‘more’ are not better.” She added.

The TPP negotiations, is being held now  to 13 March in Singapore. “As parties to the WHO FCTC strive to implement commitments to reduce tobacco consumption, liberalized trade of tobacco can defeat the purpose of raising domestic tobacco taxes and other tobacco control measures,” SEATCA added. “Trade openness makes tobacco products more easily available, with a greater negative impact on tobacco consumption in low-income countries where most of today’s tobacco consumers live.”

The public health community has not seen the text of the exception, because only big corporations are allowed to see the draft TPP text. But we’ve had it described to us at length. It was the result of painful negotiations among the United States Trade Representative (USTR), the White House, Health and Human Services, Congress, and Big Tobacco. As far as our experts can tell (not having seen it), it’s not great, but it would at least get the conversation about tobacco going amongst the TPP negotiators. There was a tacit agreement between the U.S. government and health groups that the latter would lay off criticizing (and even extolling the virtues of) the exception or the TPP in general in order to give the administration political cover to actually table the exception. So we waited. And waited. There were some hints that once the election was over, the political balancing would change and it would be tabled. It’s over, and it wasn’t.

Will it be tabled next time? USTR won’t say. When asked for a reason for the delay, they answer “We are still consulting on the text.” Which is a strange answer for two reasons. First, back in May USTR made a point of telling us that it was extremely difficult to agree on the text, and that a lot of political give and take was necessary. It took months. So how are revisions politically feasible? Second, who are they consulting with? They certainly haven’t been asking us for any input.

There are TPP negotiators from other countries who are keen to see the exception, and to see their tobacco regulations protected under the agreement. But in general, the U.S. holds most of the power in trade negotiations – smaller countries are reluctant to rock the boat, and so rather than propose something themselves, they would prefer to wait for the U.S. to start the conversation. We’ve been prepping them for 18 months on the tobacco issue, and they are ready to talk.

A trade expert pointed out recently that the U.S. tobacco proposal (as far as they could tell from not reading it) sounded a lot more like a reservation than an exception. Reservations are taken at the very end of negotiations, when most chapters have been closed. Is the U.S. simply going to protect its own tobacco measures at the last moment, and leave the other countries open to endless lawsuits from the tobacco industry? If so, was this the plan all along, or has the plan changed due to industry pressure? Either way, if the exception is never tabled, public health groups should be outraged at being lied to. And the administration should be ashamed. Their failure to act – and duplicitous treatment of constituents who largely supported it in the last election – will directly lead to millions of additional deaths.

President Obama, please do the right thing. There is no grey area here – the interests of Big Tobacco are directly opposed to the interests of public health. They are not a stakeholder, they are the vector of a disease that will kill one billion people this century.

Linda Menghetti, an expert on investment issues who formerly served as vice president of the Emergency Committee for American Trade, left that position at the end of August and has moved over to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), where she is taking the position vacated by Frank Vargo, sources said.

Vargo retired last June after serving for years as NAM’s vice president for international affairs. In her new role, Menghetti will likely have a hand in hiring a replacement for Steve Jacobs, who left his job as senior director for international business policy at NAM earlier this year in order to work for Philip Morris International.

Philip Morris is vehemently opposing U.S. efforts to craft tobacco-specific provisions in a TPP deal, and is working with other business groups and members of Congress to gin up opposition.

In another big move, the biotechnology company known as Amgen this summer hired Paul Neureiter to serve as executive director for international government affairs. Neureiter previously served as senior director for international trade at Pfizer Inc., and before that covered trade-related insurance issues for The ACE Group.

Amgen is pushing hard to convince the Obama administration to demand stringent intellectual property protections for biologic drugs in the TPP talks. At Amgen, Neureiter now works alongside Catherine Robinson, who joined the international corporate affairs team at Amgen last year after covering high-tech trade issues at NAM for years.

In his previous role at Pfizer, Neureiter worked with Doug Goudie, who served as NAM’s director of international trade policy for five years before joining Pfizer last January as its director of international government affairs.

Kathryn Dickey Karol is joining Caterpillar Inc. next week in the newly created position of vice president with responsibility for global government and corporate affairs. Karol previously served as vice president of global government and corporate affairs for Amgen, a position she had held since 2006.

Prior to her work at Amgen, Karol served as executive director of government affairs for Eli Lilly & Company, according to a Caterpillar press release.

Rounding out the job swaps, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) announced on Aug. 28 that Scott Miller, the former director of global trade policy at Procter & Gamble, has joined CSIS as the new William M. Scholl Chair in International Business.

Miller takes the place of Meredith Broadbent, who has been appointed to the International Trade Commission.

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