Letter to Kemi Badenoch to halt the accession to Pacific trade deal.

Kemi Badenoch MP Secretary of State for the Department for Business and Trade Department for Business and Trade 3 Whitehall Place London SW1A 2HP 31st March 2023 Dear Secretary of State Re: UK Accession to CPTPP The undersigned organisations call for the UK to halt the accession process to the Comprehensive and Progressive Transpacific Partnership agreement (CPTPP). [...] Accession is estimated to add 0.08% to UK GDP “in the long run”, the equivalent of £27.73, or around ten cups of coffee, per person per year.1 The UK already has bilateral agreements with nine of the eleven member states2, further reducing the benefit of joining the CPTPP. [...] As their standards in several sectors are well below those permitted in the UK, this would increase the detrimental impact for UK farming and its ability to shift to a sustainable, higher animal welfare, agroecological model.8 The UK should consider introducing core environmental and animal welfare standards as part of a package of measures to ensure the UK and other countries, particularly less w. [...] The impacts of these and other measures in the deal are deeply gendered, potentially pushing women, who are the majority of small-scale, subsistence farmers, to compete against large scale agribusiness, and posing a threat to the provision of freely accessible public services.10 Less wealthy CPTPP members initially agreed to these because they thought they would get increased access to the US mark. [...] It recognises that mechanisms like the one in CPTPP pose threats to the climate and UK taxpayer.13 The system has also seen governments around the world pay significant sums to defend policies such as increasing the minimum wage, introducing plain packaging on cigarettes and introducing a sugar tax.