The Pacific Network on Globalisation, or PANG, has launched a campaign against the PACER-Plus agreement, calling on Pacific governments to walk away from the trade negotiations.
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PACER-Plus negotiations began in 2009 and will include agreements on trade in goods and services, investment, labour mobility and development when launched at the end of 2015.
PANG's trade justice campaigner, Adam Wolfenden, says the agreement would lock communities into a model of development that has no relevance to the Pacific reality.
"Why are we having PACER-Plus? An agreement based on a set of ideas that doesn't reflect the Pacific. And what we are arguing is that instead we should be having a whole new discussion about what development means in the Pacific, what the economic future could be of the Pacific that actually really looks to its strengths, doesn't look to things like customary control of land as a barrier to trade."
Adam Wolfenden says as part of the campaign, PANG has launched two briefs which lay out in simple terms what PACER-Plus will mean for Pacific communities.
