"The environmental blind spot in Asia’s big new FTA", 19 December 2020

The world’s largest multilateral free-trade pact was signed on November 15, linking the economies of the 10 member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand into the new Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. [...]

In October, the European Parliament called for the imposition of mandatory due diligence regulations requiring companies to prove that products they sell in the European Union do not fuel global deforestation or human rights violations. 

The RCEP drafters’ failure to include labour-rights protections is particularly troublesome given the long history of abusive exploitation of workers in Southeast Asia’s commodity production chains, particularly palm oil and rubber. Palm-oil and rubber exports from Southeast Asia are essential to the industrial manufacturing economies of China, Japan and South Korea.

Labour-rights concerns have been heightened by the publication since September of a series of investigative features by the Associated Press detailing widespread abuses on Southeast Asian oil-palm plantations, including forced labour and sexual violence against women and girls.

Separately, in September the US Customs and Border Protection agency imposed a ban on imports by the Malaysian palm-oil company FGV Holdings due to evidence of “abuse of the vulnerable, deception, physical and sexual violence, intimidation and threats, and retention of identity documents” by company officials. 

The Brookings Institute takes a sanguine view of the absence of environmental and labour rights protections in the RCEP, opining that “ASEAN-centered trade agreements tend to improve over time.” Let’s hope. Because the stakes are high, and time is short. [...]