The Obama administration released this week a report that takes aim at a litany of sensitive domestic policies in countries currently negotiating theTrans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), identifying the policies as “trade barriers” that the United States seeks to eliminate. The target list of TPP nations’ domestic policies, published in the 2013 National Trade Estimate Report by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), offers unusual insight into why negotiations over the sweeping, 11-nation deal are contentious and have repeatedly missed deadlines for completion, said Public Citizen today.

The 406-page USTR report indicts a wide array of public health policies, financial regulations, politically sensitive manufacturing and agricultural policies and even religious standards as “trade barriers” that should be dismantled. USTR levies such criticism against policies in all current and prospective TPP negotiating parties, including New Zealand’s popular health programs to control medicine costs, an Australian law to prevent the offshoring of consumers’ private health data, Vietnam’s post-crisis regulations requiring banks to hold adequate capital, and Canada’s standards requiring cheese to be made from milk.

For Malaysia, a predominantly Muslim country, the USTR report admonishes the government for “requiring that slaughter plants maintain dedicated halal facilities and ensure segregated transportation for halal and non-halal products.” Instead, the report suggests that the government should conform its notions of Islamic meat-processing requirements to those established by Codex Alimentarius, an international food standards body at which multinational food corporations play a central role. USTR also takes issue with restrictions on importation of pork and alcohol in this TPP negotiating country where three out of every five consumers are Muslims.

“Even before the Obama administration’s not-so-diplomatic target list of other countries’ domestic policies, the Trans-Pacific Partnership was on rocky ground, with negotiators from many countries rejecting U.S. demands to expand patent monopolies for foreign pharmaceutical corporations and to subject their financial, health and environmental policies to foreign investor challenges before international tribunals empowered to order government compensation,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “By openly listing the domestic policies in other TPP countries that it wants dismantled, the Obama administration can only intensify growing public concern about the TPP in these countries.”

USTR reserves some of its most detailed policy critiques in the National Trade Estimate Report for Japan, which recently announced its intent to join the TPP negotiations. The report devotes 16 pages to castigating food labeling policies for providing too much information to consumers, outlining how exactly the country should restructure its public insurance system, urging the government to grant tax benefits to foreign universities, and bemoaning Japan’s preference that its military equipment be made domestically. (The United States has similar rules on military procurement.)

The report also takes aim at Japan’s agricultural policies, recommending, for example, the weakening of protections for domestic rice farmers because “Japanese consumers would buy U.S. high quality rice if it were more readily available.” The political party of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, backed by powerful farmer groups, has approved a policy position that would require the country to exclude rice, wheat and barley, beef and pork, sugar and dairy products from tariff eliminations in the TPP. In contrast, the USTR report explicitly names all but one of these sensitive sectors (sugar) as high-priority targets for liberalization.

For several TPP countries, USTR’s National Trade Estimate Report encourages the adoption of copyright enforcement measures akin to those proposed under the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that was defeated in the U.S. Congress. For example, the report notes that the Obama administration “has also urged Chile…to amend its Internet service provider liability regime to permit effective action against any act of infringement of copyright and related rights.”

When addressing some TPP countries, the USTR report accuses national governments of broad corruption or even incompetence. For example, the report states that two of Peru’s three federal branches of government lack the “impartiality” or “expertise” required to fulfill their responsibilities.

USTR also chooses to mount public criticisms against TPP countries for “trade barriers” that are so specific in definition and trivial in consequence as to seem motivated by comically narrow U.S. corporate interests. For example, the report lambasts Singapore’s import restriction for “non-medicinal chewing gum,” Canada’s high tariff on “breaded cheese sticks,” and Peru’s refusal to import “cars over five years old.”

Among the report’s hundreds of pages, the following commentaries on TPP countries are some of the most revealing: