Ms Darina Allen:

I wear not just the Slow Food Ireland hat but also some others, including the Taste Council of Ireland, Euro-Toques Ireland and Good Food Ireland. I thank members for the opportunity to appear before the committee.

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, TTIP, agreement poses a serious threat to the well-regulated Irish and European food industry. One of the objectives of the TTIP negotiations is to achieve mutual recognition and harmonisation of food standards between America and Europe. While nobody could argue against that, of course, the devil is in the detail. The organisations I represent reject these proposals. The following are some of the areas over which we express serious concern.

The European Commission’s stated TTIP negotiating position is to abandon what is termed the "precautionary principle". This is the system whereby chemicals and pesticides used in our food system must be proven to be safe for animal and human health prior to use. In the US, the reverse is the case. Many carcinogenic and endocrine-disrupting chemicals used in food production there are banned in Europe. The proposed TTIP mutual-recognition system means we would no longer be able to ban these chemicals.

EU regulations currently require measures along the whole chain of production to guarantee the safety of the final product. However, the US system mostly verifies the safety of the end product and is therefore prone to resorting to pathogen-reduction treatments. For example, instead of preventing chickens getting infected with pathogens during all stages of rearing and slaughter, the poultry industry there resorts to dipping chickens in chlorine to eliminate bacteria at the end of the meat production chain. Again, the harmonisation of food standards proposed in TTIP would make it impossible to maintain our standards and continue to ban the import of such foods. With more chemical inputs and higher capital costs of production than in Europe, the US factory-food system produces food at a lower unit cost, and will therefore create unfair competition.

In the US, growth hormone-injected beef and dairy herds lead to lower unit prices for consumers but also to lower quality meat, and the associated human and animal health implications meaning that only those using intensive factory farming methods and liberal use of antibiotics are able to stay in business. The objective of TTIP is to allow not only US unlabelled hormone-injected beef to be sold in Europe but also to allow the sale of unlabelled American GMO, genetically modified organism, products.

All existing food regulations not explicitly overturned in the TTIP, and all future higher and improved standards of food regulation will be subject to being overturned by a proposed quasi-judicial system of arbitration called ISDS, or investor-state dispute settlement.

The Commission has declared it would prefer not to have this now in TTIP and would rather replace it with the new ISDS, which it calls the investment court system or ICS. The ICS, as envisaged by the Commission, is almost exactly the same as the old ISDS except that all the people who act as arbitrators would have to be qualified to practise as judges in the EU before they are considered qualified to act as arbitrators in the new ICS. The latter would have an appeal system, which is a new idea. Mr. Finnegan will explain why nothing much has changed in that regard.

The EU-US proposal for TTIP is to establish a new legal system just for foreign investors so that they can bypass the Irish, European and American judicial systems when they feel their current or future profits are being infringed upon as a result of vague, ill-defined government action, such as "unnecessarily restrictive barriers to trade" or "overly meddlesome barriers to trade". That would include everything from what constitutes organic food standards to correct labelling and highlighting food allergy contents on labels.

So who will benefit from this agreement? It will certainly not be consumers - who will see food information further weakened as a result of longer food supply chains - nor will it be the large majority of small-scale producers who service local markets and who make up the societal and economic fabric of quality food production, the guardians of the environment and food traditions.

It seems that TTIP will give rights to corporations to sue governments over decisions that may harm their potential profit margins. There are already many examples of that as a result of a new law being introduced. They will be able to do that through an ISDS, investor-state dispute settlement, mechanism, where cases are held in private. Corporations can sue governments using the ISDS system but governments cannot sue corporations.