"Trading Away Land Rights: TPP, investment agreements, and the governance of land" 14 Oct 2015

As U.S. trade negotiators herd their Pacific Rim counterparts toward the final text of a long-promised Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), the investment chapter remains a point of contention. Like the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and most U.S. trade agreements since, the TPP text includes controversial provisions that limit the power of national governments to regulate incoming foreign investment and give investors rights to sue host governments for regulatory measures, even those taken in the public interest, that limit their expected returns...Sometimes, even before an investor enters the country, these investment treaties threaten land governance by extending the “right of establishment” to investors from partner countries. This means that under the TPP and most modern BITs [bilateral investment treaties], host countries must treat foreign investors on par with domestic investors, giving no priority to nationals even in sensitive areas such as land, minerals, and other natural resources...[M]any provisions of investment treaties would conflict with efforts by a government to implement the Voluntary Guidelines on the Governance of Land Tenure (VGGT) from the FAO, now the gold standard for appropriate recognition of land rights...[T]here are other investment treaty models out there. The Southern African Development Community drafted a model BIT with some of these threats to governance in mind...