International agreements for the liberalisation of markets to facilitate trading between the continents are deepening the processes of globalization based on neo-liberal ideas of free trading and deregulation in order to homogenize the world. The Transatlantic Trade and Investments Partnership (TTIP) is a historically unprecedented bilateral agreement between the European Union and the United States, which aims to harmonize the rules for the production and sale of products, and consequently determining the fate of 800 million people. The agreement is bringing benefits, but on the other hand traps for the EU citizens. TTIP aims to uniform standards and regulatory compliance with promises to simplify trading with lower customs duties and thus providing cheaper products for consumers.
In the light of studying the consequences of the possible adoption of TTIP, we used the ex-ante evaluation of policies. With the historical and comparative method, we compared the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the consequences of China's accession to the WTO on the economies of individual countries. Both methods were also key to understanding the scope of regulation of GMOs in the US, the EU, and Slovenia.
It brings foreign capital for development, technological innovation, and investments in infrastructure, but at the same time the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (the mechanism of ISDS). ISDS protects foreign companies and exposes countries to lawsuits claiming extremely high compensation, which are, in the end, paid from citizens’ pockets. At the same time, ignoring the key European precautionary principle and thus endangering human and animal health, as well as the environment, unlabelled GMO-contaminated food produced by the U.S. industrial agriculture will arrive. Harmonization of such different GMO legislations is virtually impossible. The opening of the European containers terminals for GM foods will be an end of sovereignty on deciding about rules governing the European market and the end of environmental biodiversity.
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