The TTIP, now being negotiated, is allowed to drive more deregulation and further water down food and farming standards. The Poultry industry in the UK is not a healthy business. In fact: “Infected chickens cause ‘growing concern’ By Helen Briggs for the BBC:

“Campylobacter, which is present in many shop chickens, is becoming resistant to front-line drugs, a study in 28 EU countries has found. It reduces the options for treating human infections, say scientists. A separate report by the UK’s Food Standards Agency found campylobacter in UK chickens remained at high levels.” More than 240,000 people a year are being made ill and up to 100 people were dying costing the NHS nearly £900m.

The Guardian: “History shows problems start when food companies police themselves: think salmonella [in eggs], BSE, foot and mouth, swine flu.

“Plans to further deregulate the poultry industry and let companies conduct their own welfare inspections may knock a penny or two off an already cheap chicken at the supermarket, but it flies against common sense and risks a return to dangerous days in Britain when food scares were rife and animal welfare was a joke.”

BSE or “mad cow” disease deserves a closer look. During the Thatcher Government the UK allowed the meat industry to regulate itself. Very soon guidelines designed to make meat safe were abandoned which led to prions, a type of protein found in some neuro-degenerative diseases like CJD, to enter the food chain, infecting an unknown number of people and killing 226 (176 in the UK, 50 in other countries), 3 due to blood transfusions.

Not only food…

Banking deregulation: The subprime mortgages that led to the 2008-8 collapse:

“Financial Deregulation and Unchecked Financial “Innovation.” A key reason that mortgages were made available so widely and with such little review of recipients’ qualifications was a shift in which institutions hold the mortgages. Traditionally, banks made mortgages and held them. In the new era, banks and non-bank mortgage lenders made loans, but then sold the loans to others. Investment banks packaged lots of mortgage loans into “Collateralized Debt Obligations” (CDOs) and then sold them on Wall Street, with a promise of a steady stream of revenue from interest payments. These operations were pretty much unregulated. Despite the supposed sophistication of the investors involved, no one took account of how shoddy the loans were or — more fundamentally — the certainty that huge numbers would go bad if and when the housing bubble popped. The Huffington Post

Energy Deregulation in the US: Enron

“Blind Faith: How Deregulation and Enron’s Influence Over Government Looted Billions from Americans

“The combination of unregulated state wholesale electricity markets and federal deregulation of commodity exchanges has removed accountability and transparency from the energy sector, allowing corporations to manipulate price and supply of electricity and natural gas through the exercise of significant market power. California’s recent energy crisis and Enron’s bankruptcy would have been impossible under a regulated system. Enron developed mutually beneficial relationships with federal regulators and lawmakers to support policies that significantly curtailed government oversight of their operations. Enron’s business model was built entirely on the premise that it could make more money speculating on electricity contracts than it could by actually producing electricity at a power plant. Central to Enron’s strategy of turning electricity into a speculative commodity was removing government oversight of its trading practices and exploiting market deficiencies to allow it to manipulate prices and supply.” Public Citizen

It is already clear that the TTIP (and its other incarnations like CETA, TTP, etc) are coming with proposed deregulation of environmental and safety standards.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” George Santayana.