The TPP is Good for Vegans (Trans-Pacific Partnership)
16 December 2015 [link youtube]
Admittedly, this is a bit of a simplified treatment of the issue, within a ten-minute limit. Currently (at the dawn of 2016), diverse voices are making directly-contradictory claims about the same facts; for example, I saw a pro-meat-industry report claiming that that Canadian beef exports to Southeast Asia will increase so dramatically that they'll offset other losses. To discuss this sort of claim, you'd then have to ask yourself a set of (surreal but serious) questions, as to whether or not you believe that the future of Canadian agriculture is in producing meat cheaply enough to sell it to Cambodians (whereas, I note, Cambodia produces rice cheaply enough to export it to Africa, etc.). There are also arguements circulating that attempt to "reassure" the industry that dairy supply-management will remain fundamentally unchanged. There will be genuinely contradictory indicators in both projections and actual economic changes, as with any sudden reduction in trade barriers. There are also seemingly-contradictory contrasts within government policy that can distract from fundamental changes in direction (e.g., providing subsidies to tobacco-agriculture, while at the same time heavily taxing it, and directing the public to quit smoking). However, the simplest and most serious point is probably what I mention near the start of the video: that supposedly-ecological advocacy groups (like the Green Party itself) see their role as supporting the meat and dairy industries in opposing the TPP agreement.
Youtube Automatic Transcription
hi this is a video being recorded in my
temporary apartment in Germany so the decoration you see around you here is not particularly my taste or not my choosing but it's a nice apartment is saying I'll be here for about two weeks this is also may be the only video where you can kind of see why some people claim I have green eyes a very peculiar eye color that never quite settles down to brown anyway I'm talking about an important issue that so far I haven't seen any intellectual response to from vegans or from other people involved with ecology and environmentalism on the contrary the response within Canada to the trans-pacific partnership from the Green Party and other typical voices for environmentalism has been negative for the following reason they presume that the role of the left wing and politics is to oppose any given free trade agreement they assume that ecology is a left-wing concern and they assume that they're for the Green Party and other ecologists should oppose the TPP now on the other hand if you're vegan you may have seen articles floating around that are proclaiming or declaiming the fact that the meat and dairy industries will collapse because of the TPP tramps of burnishing and if you're vegan you must look at those articles with one eyebrow raised because from a vegan perspective that is a good thing this video is to confirm very simply that while there are some protections for the poultry industry for the egg industry well there are some protections for some industries it is basically true that the TPP the trans-pacific partnership will massively destabilize the beef and dairy industries will massively destabilize the pork industry's and definitely for a country like Canada it is not an exaggeration to say this will be the end of the meat industry as we know it how it would affect a country like Colombia is a very different story I would expect that a country like Colombia Argentina etc if they do enter the trans-pacific partnership it's it's unknown there a lot of question marks they may be producing more beef exactly to export it to countries like Canada so look if you want to know what's going off the TPP right now the text of the agreement has only been available to the public for a couple of months and to understand it you need a pretty good education and economic Social Sciences political science if you can get it I feel guilty saying that because I learned nothing in my political science to pull or despise getting that diploma not because that's booma um but I digress what you need to do is look through a glossary of the jargon and the acronym so the peculiar terms used in the agreement but once you do that for example I was scrolling through the list of guaranteed tariff-free commodities the what the TPP guarantees will be freely traded without restrictions without prices being controlled by governments and beef is on there in legal jargon meat of bovine animals poultry is not poultry is that are much more complicated provisions governing poultry a cow meat pig meat primate meat is protected so if you were the one guy who owns a monkey farm in New York State and you've been complaining for all these years that it's really difficult to sell monkey meat in Montreal to export your monkey meat between Canada the United States this free trade agreement is for you it's going to benefit your business and you know the whole lung primate meat industry I mean you know eight hamburgers all of those forms of meat will now be freely traded within this huge international zone obviously that type of meat will probably be traded primarily for scientific experimentation perhaps more seriously whale meat dolphin meat porpoise meat etc is protected for free trade also so there are some interesting question marks there but look the big news is and I don't know who's going to write the articles who's going to have the kind of intellectual clout to deal with the knock-on effects of this but I see two big categories of impacts one directly and immediately this agreement we're talking about will lead to the collapse of the government-controlled beef and dairy industries definitely in Canada that'll be the end of the world as we know it in those industries and that's a good thing from a vegan perspective it's a good thing from an ecological perspective it's a good thing even just in terms of pure economic efficiency it's a wonderful thing so yeah as far as I can see there's no safety net here those industries in Canada are going to absolutely collapse and little bits and pieces of the industry that actually are efficient that actually produce a product people want will survive or possibly thrive but in the main are pseudo socialist system of having taxpayers subsidize the production of meat and dairy and having the government control the prices etc that is going to have to end under the trans-pacific partnership and that's wonderful news for vegans and vegans are a tiny percentage of population we only people who care about ecology are pretty small percentage of population so it's hard to imagine another legal context where that type of fundamental change and challenge could come about so that's like for us to celebrate and if you're a conventional left-wing person who opposes free trade agreements it might be something for you to do some philosophizing about the second aspect I wanted to mention briefly is the interaction between meat production and nationalism if you google British beef you're going to find that England is a typical western country in that they glorify meat production in terms of nationalism and use nationalism to justify the provision of those protectionist measures subsidies to meet AG meet agriculture whatever going to call it meat production cattle farming and so on and of course the dairy industry and what have you um in a more subtle and profound and long-term way the trans-pacific partnership is going to destroy this pride the you know notions Canadians have that somehow meat production is part of our national independence and that nationalism justifies the taxpayers supporting meat production so that's a more subtle and long-term ripple effect that's not the collapse of anything that's not a sort of directly measurable economic change but i do think within my lifetime if the trans-pacific partnership goes ahead you'll get a little bit of a sobering up in people's attitudes where they stop thinking of milk and beef as magical especially important goods and instead start to analyze what the government is doing and what the consuming public is doing and a little bit more of a pragmatic and critical way living in the world we're living in it would be a step in the right direction if people could just think about beef the same way they think about tobacco hmm as something that's somewhat harmful both the human health and the environment we live in and so on something that government policy is involved in but nobody today would support the idea of the taxpayers money should go into supporting the expansion of the tobacco industry or into making cigarettes cheaper for people everyone presumed to the role the government is to make cigarettes more expensive that is a huge difference at the end of World War two American taxpayers were not only paying to make tobacco cheaper in the united states that actually spent a huge amount of money to provide American cigarettes to Germans true fact when the Americans won the war they thought this was a great opportunity to get the Germans hooked on tobacco exported from united states hope that the US taxpayer deeply in debt from fighting sexual for paid the bill for that yeah so it is what it is I myself have not devoted a lot of time to looking at the trans-pacific partnership the analysis of what the agreement is what it entails what its long-term impacts will be is kind of in its infancy right now this is December of 2015 but yeah leaping off the page fundamentally an agreement to abolish tariffs and other controls over the export of beef pork etc that alone is going to have a profound impact on both what the meat industry really is and on how people think about
temporary apartment in Germany so the decoration you see around you here is not particularly my taste or not my choosing but it's a nice apartment is saying I'll be here for about two weeks this is also may be the only video where you can kind of see why some people claim I have green eyes a very peculiar eye color that never quite settles down to brown anyway I'm talking about an important issue that so far I haven't seen any intellectual response to from vegans or from other people involved with ecology and environmentalism on the contrary the response within Canada to the trans-pacific partnership from the Green Party and other typical voices for environmentalism has been negative for the following reason they presume that the role of the left wing and politics is to oppose any given free trade agreement they assume that ecology is a left-wing concern and they assume that they're for the Green Party and other ecologists should oppose the TPP now on the other hand if you're vegan you may have seen articles floating around that are proclaiming or declaiming the fact that the meat and dairy industries will collapse because of the TPP tramps of burnishing and if you're vegan you must look at those articles with one eyebrow raised because from a vegan perspective that is a good thing this video is to confirm very simply that while there are some protections for the poultry industry for the egg industry well there are some protections for some industries it is basically true that the TPP the trans-pacific partnership will massively destabilize the beef and dairy industries will massively destabilize the pork industry's and definitely for a country like Canada it is not an exaggeration to say this will be the end of the meat industry as we know it how it would affect a country like Colombia is a very different story I would expect that a country like Colombia Argentina etc if they do enter the trans-pacific partnership it's it's unknown there a lot of question marks they may be producing more beef exactly to export it to countries like Canada so look if you want to know what's going off the TPP right now the text of the agreement has only been available to the public for a couple of months and to understand it you need a pretty good education and economic Social Sciences political science if you can get it I feel guilty saying that because I learned nothing in my political science to pull or despise getting that diploma not because that's booma um but I digress what you need to do is look through a glossary of the jargon and the acronym so the peculiar terms used in the agreement but once you do that for example I was scrolling through the list of guaranteed tariff-free commodities the what the TPP guarantees will be freely traded without restrictions without prices being controlled by governments and beef is on there in legal jargon meat of bovine animals poultry is not poultry is that are much more complicated provisions governing poultry a cow meat pig meat primate meat is protected so if you were the one guy who owns a monkey farm in New York State and you've been complaining for all these years that it's really difficult to sell monkey meat in Montreal to export your monkey meat between Canada the United States this free trade agreement is for you it's going to benefit your business and you know the whole lung primate meat industry I mean you know eight hamburgers all of those forms of meat will now be freely traded within this huge international zone obviously that type of meat will probably be traded primarily for scientific experimentation perhaps more seriously whale meat dolphin meat porpoise meat etc is protected for free trade also so there are some interesting question marks there but look the big news is and I don't know who's going to write the articles who's going to have the kind of intellectual clout to deal with the knock-on effects of this but I see two big categories of impacts one directly and immediately this agreement we're talking about will lead to the collapse of the government-controlled beef and dairy industries definitely in Canada that'll be the end of the world as we know it in those industries and that's a good thing from a vegan perspective it's a good thing from an ecological perspective it's a good thing even just in terms of pure economic efficiency it's a wonderful thing so yeah as far as I can see there's no safety net here those industries in Canada are going to absolutely collapse and little bits and pieces of the industry that actually are efficient that actually produce a product people want will survive or possibly thrive but in the main are pseudo socialist system of having taxpayers subsidize the production of meat and dairy and having the government control the prices etc that is going to have to end under the trans-pacific partnership and that's wonderful news for vegans and vegans are a tiny percentage of population we only people who care about ecology are pretty small percentage of population so it's hard to imagine another legal context where that type of fundamental change and challenge could come about so that's like for us to celebrate and if you're a conventional left-wing person who opposes free trade agreements it might be something for you to do some philosophizing about the second aspect I wanted to mention briefly is the interaction between meat production and nationalism if you google British beef you're going to find that England is a typical western country in that they glorify meat production in terms of nationalism and use nationalism to justify the provision of those protectionist measures subsidies to meet AG meet agriculture whatever going to call it meat production cattle farming and so on and of course the dairy industry and what have you um in a more subtle and profound and long-term way the trans-pacific partnership is going to destroy this pride the you know notions Canadians have that somehow meat production is part of our national independence and that nationalism justifies the taxpayers supporting meat production so that's a more subtle and long-term ripple effect that's not the collapse of anything that's not a sort of directly measurable economic change but i do think within my lifetime if the trans-pacific partnership goes ahead you'll get a little bit of a sobering up in people's attitudes where they stop thinking of milk and beef as magical especially important goods and instead start to analyze what the government is doing and what the consuming public is doing and a little bit more of a pragmatic and critical way living in the world we're living in it would be a step in the right direction if people could just think about beef the same way they think about tobacco hmm as something that's somewhat harmful both the human health and the environment we live in and so on something that government policy is involved in but nobody today would support the idea of the taxpayers money should go into supporting the expansion of the tobacco industry or into making cigarettes cheaper for people everyone presumed to the role the government is to make cigarettes more expensive that is a huge difference at the end of World War two American taxpayers were not only paying to make tobacco cheaper in the united states that actually spent a huge amount of money to provide American cigarettes to Germans true fact when the Americans won the war they thought this was a great opportunity to get the Germans hooked on tobacco exported from united states hope that the US taxpayer deeply in debt from fighting sexual for paid the bill for that yeah so it is what it is I myself have not devoted a lot of time to looking at the trans-pacific partnership the analysis of what the agreement is what it entails what its long-term impacts will be is kind of in its infancy right now this is December of 2015 but yeah leaping off the page fundamentally an agreement to abolish tariffs and other controls over the export of beef pork etc that alone is going to have a profound impact on both what the meat industry really is and on how people think about