Last week Myanmar president Thein Sein made a state
visit to Washington DC. The major
developments were the signing
of a Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA) as well as more
movement on the lifting of almost all sanctions on the regime. This has been covered in depth elsewhere, but
I wanted to add some clarifications to the general discussion.
First, a TIFA agreement is not
a Free Trade Agreement (FTA). It does
not provide for open markets in goods, services and investment. Rather, a TIFA
agreement merely provides a framework for the governments to discuss issues
regarding goods, services, investment and other cross-border economic
relationships. In other words, a TIFA agreement is merely an agreement to
formalize discussions. With Myanmar, this
is a significant development in and of itself (that and the fact that the
agreement refers to the country as “Myanmar”, although the USTR website refers
to “Burma”), but let’s keep this in perspective. With this TIFA, the US now has agreements
with 7 of the 10 ASEAN countries and ASEAN itself, plus the US-Singapore FTA.
Only Laos does not have some sort of trade-related bilateral agreement with the
US, but that will just be a matter of time.
The more important
development regards the US Burma sanctions.
Senator
Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who had been a major supporter of Burma sanctions,
indicated that he would not support renewal of the US legislation authorizing
the sanctions. This was to be
expected, particularly as the Myanmar regime has improved its treatment of
Christian minorities in the country, an important issue for Senator
McConnell. Increasingly, then,
supporters of continued Burma sanctions are dwindling to a hard core of human
rights advocates who are concerned about the treatment of the Rohingya and want
faster progress on democracy issues. It
looks like almost all of the US Burma sanctions, with the exception of the
drug-related sanctions may eventually go, as even military-related sanctions
may be relaxed.
