By lowering trade barriers among the United States and 11 nations scattered around the Pacific Rim from Japan to Chile, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) pact is intended to help countries specialise in producing and exporting whatever goods and services they can make most efficiently, while importing the rest. In the long run, that could help decrease some of the prices consumers see in stores.
But the details of the agreement are a complex hodgepodge of new rules, some of them intended to protect the way business is conducted by a number of powerful industries, while others will open the door to new markets.
For American dairy farmers, the agreement means new opportunities to start selling some milk to Canada, a nearly closed market now. For cattle ranchers in the Midwest, the pact means a gradual reduction over the next 15 years in steep Japanese tariffs on beef imports that have protected Japan's famous producers of tender but costly Wagyu beef.
One of the final sticking points to getting a deal was agreeing on a standard for temporarily protecting drugs made using biotechnology from competition. In the end, negotiators agreed to a five-year minimum period of market exclusivity in each country, plus options for additional years, before these drugs could face competition from cheaper imitations known as biosimilars.
The pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries had pushed for 12 years. Critics of the pharmaceutical industry, while welcoming the shortening of the exclusivity period, said the trade agreement as a whole would still impede access to affordable medicines, particularly for the less-developed countries in the pact.
"They've been able to eliminate a number of harmful rules from the agreement, and that will save many lives," said Peter Maybarduk, director of the access-to-medicines programme at the public-interest group Public Citizen. "The agreement could have been much worse."
Still, Mr Maybarduk said the agreement as a whole imposed new patent and market exclusivity rules on countries that now do not have them.
"For us, any TPP is making things worse," he said. "The industry will have many more tools with which to defend its monopoly business model."
The Trans-Pacific Partnership passed on Monday. Trade ministers from 12 Pacific Rim countries agreed to lift most duties on trade and investment, set new business standards and protect intellectual property rights. (Courtesy of Humanosphere.com)
For steel makers, car-parts manufacturers, garment companies and solar panel producers, as well as their hundreds of thousands of workers, the question is whether the gradual reduction of import tariffs and other trade barriers will unintentionally provide a back door for more Chinese goods to enter the United States.
The agreement has elaborate "rules of origin" that determine which goods will qualify for duty-free treatment. In the car industry, for example, 45% of the value of each car or light truck will need to be produced in a TPP member country for the vehicle to be charged little or no duty by customs officials.
Labour leaders and companies vulnerable to import competition warned that the deal could lead to job losses in the United States. "It's complete devastation of the auto supply chain," Leo Gerard, the international president of the United Steelworkers, said in a telephone interview. "If you look at the autos these days, they're assembled from parts from all over the place."
The Obama administration contends that the system will be tightly enforced to make sure that the minimum content standards are met.
One surprise on Monday came when the Treasury announced that, in addition to lowering trade barriers, the 12 TPP member nations would "strengthen macroeconomic cooperation, including on exchange rate issues, in appropriate fora". The 12 countries are discussing a possible arrangement for senior finance ministry and central bank officials to meet periodically.
Congress put considerable pressure on the Obama administration last spring to insist on an enforceable currency provision in the trade pact. But the administration and the Federal Reserve fought back, saying that it might someday be used against US policymakers to limit their flexibility to set short-term interest rates and adopt other monetary measures.
Foreign governments said a currency provision could be a deal breaker. It was opposed not only by Japan but also smaller countries like Singapore that informally peg their currencies to the dollar.
Many US companies put their intellectual property in Singapore subsidiaries for legal reasons and tax reasons, and warned that they might not support the final agreement if Singapore left the negotiations over the currency issue. Congress ended up urging but not requiring the administration to negotiate a currency provision.
Food safety is another issue. Critics contend that it will become easier for contaminated seafood to enter the United States with less inspection from big seafood exporters like Vietnam. Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, said that while the precise details of the pact had not yet been released, it raised the potential for outbreaks of disease that could hurt public confidence in all seafood, including products of the US fisheries industry.
The Obama administration has repeatedly denied that the pact will affect food safety. Gavin Gibbons, a spokesman for the National Fisheries Institute, an industry trade group, said the pact would not undermine the reliability of import inspections.
From the start, the negotiations have been as much about geopolitics as about commerce. The Obama administration has promoted an overarching regional trade deal as a way to strengthen trade relationships with US allies as tensions have increased with China. At the same time, US trade officials have also suggested that it could be a model for an eventual free-trade pact with China itself.
China has emerged as the largest foreign investor in many Asian countries as well as the biggest exporter to them, and that has given China a stake in greater openness.
"I don't think China is that much concerned about the TPP," said He Weiwen, a former Chinese commerce ministry official who is now the co-director of the influential China-US/EU Study Centre at the China Association of International Trade in Beijing.
"China will learn more and apply whatever is appropriate." ©2015 The New York Times
Keith Bradsher is a business and economics reporter for The New York Times. Andy Pollack has covered the business and science of biotechnology since 2000.