The UK’s International Trade Secretary has said farmers’ fears that free trade agreements with Australia and New Zealand would flood the UK market with cheap meat is “misplaced”.
Anne-Marie Trevelyan, secretary of state for international trade, told the Financial Times in an interview during a trip to Australia that the deals would help curb inflation in Britain by “eliminating” tariffs on imported goods.
She said the UK had built safeguards into free trade agreements in the form of quotas over a 15-year period to act as a “sliding scale” to rebalance Britain’s agricultural economy after Brexit. New Zealand, for example, already has a large quota for lamb exports to the UK that it doesn’t use because most of the meat is sold in Asia.
“Some of the fear was misplaced,” she said of British farmers’ fears.
“I don’t think we need to worry, but because there were concerns, and we understand why, both governments were very happy to work out a transitional protection, which, you know, eventually weakens,” she added. .
The National Farmers Union has said the cost of the free trade agreements to UK industry would be £150m and has warned the deals could exacerbate precarious trade conditions for the industry.
That led to accusations that farmers were trying to negotiate a trade deal designed to improve migratory flows and take a number of industries hostage.
The UK government expects the trade deal with New Zealand to boost trade by 60 percent and add £800m to the UK economy. The Australian deal is estimated to boost trade by £10.4 billion and add £2.3 billion to the UK economy.
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Trevelyan is the first British minister to visit Australia since Anthony Albanian was elected Prime Minister in May. She said supporting legislation for the trade agreements would be introduced in the coming weeks and expects the deal to be fully ratified by early 2023.
Trevelyan was also confident that negotiations over Britain’s accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, or CPTTP, regional trading bloc would be concluded before the end of the year.
“It is a very important trading bloc for us because it stands up for its values of free and fair trade. That’s why we want to be there,’ she says.
When asked whether the UK would support China’s entry into the bloc, Trevelyan said each candidate member should be tested to see if its legislation passes the “gold standard” tests for accession.