Just a few days after the United States and Britain announced to much fanfare that they had agreed to lower some tariffs and create a $5 billion export opportunity for American beef, ethanol and other agricultural products in Britain, Brooke Rollins, the U.S. secretary of agriculture, touched down in London.
She came with a clear message for her British counterparts: The agreement last week was just the first step.
Ms. Rollins, the first member of President Trump’s cabinet to visit Britain, said she would push for more access for American products, such as pork, poultry, seafood and rice. But among her first tasks was countering the narrative in Britain, and across Europe, that American meat is substandard.
“The U.S. is open for business, and we have wholesome, quality and safe products that we want to ensure are accessible to consumers around the world and across the U.K.,” Ms. Rollins told reporters on Tuesday.
The United States is Britain’s largest single trade partner, but most of that trade is skewed toward services. Cars, fuel, pharmaceuticals and aircraft make up most of the trade in goods. Britain relies on imports for 40 percent of its food, but less than 2 percent of Britain’s imported food, including live animals, comes from the United States.
That minuscule amount has long been a contentious issue for U.S. officials, who have argued that Britain has been overly protectionist and discriminatory toward American food. British officials have said they are upholding high standards for food safety, animal welfare and environmental protections as the public recoils from the thought of hormone-treated beef or chlorine-washed chicken.
Despite last week’s provisional agreement, differences in food production could make it difficult for Britain and the United States to reach a more comprehensive trade agreement, and for American farmers to materially increase their exports to Britain.
Still, for several days in London, Ms. Rollins promoted the agreement, and the hope that it would open markets and create billions of dollars in gains, even though Britain is not that significant to the American farmer.
“It is just the beginning of a new day of partnership, perhaps unprecedented, in our two countries’ histories,” Ms. Rollins said. On Wednesday, she said there would be more announcements on the trade agreement in the coming weeks.
Vincent H. Smith, the director of agricultural policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said he doubted that the agreement would raise the prices that American beef producers or corn growers received when they sold their products.
But “is something better than nothing?” he added. “Yes.”
For American exports to materially increase, British standards would need to allow enough American products to enter the country, and British consumers would have to buy them. At the moment, most American beef cannot be exported to Britain, in part because of the widespread practice of hormone treatment but also because of other regulations, including those covering the method of slaughter.
For consumers in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, “it’s not just about the end product — it’s about the process,” said Carolina Maciel, a trade lawyer with expertise in agrifood regulation at the UK Trade Policy Observatory. “They want to ensure the entire supply chain is fair, green and humane. That’s not yet the approach taken by the U.S.”
The use of growth-promoting hormones is banned in Britain, where there is a strong emphasis on raising animals with more space, as well as environmental rules that govern the protection of land and water around farms. Britain’s regulations are mostly a holdover from when it was part of the European Union, and there has been public resistance to changing them since Brexit.
In practice, many of these rules and practices do not change the safety of the final product, but they do increase costs. And British farmers fear being undercut by cheaper imports.
Most trade agreements do not radically increase markets overnight; the change takes years, if it happens at all. Kent Bacus, the executive director of government affairs at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, pointed to the 2007 agreement between the United States and South Korea. Since then, South Korea has become the largest export market by value for American beef, bigger than Japan, China, Mexico or Canada.
Last week, Britain and the United States said they would set an import quota of 13,000 metric tons of beef for each other. That could increase the amount of U.S. beef in Britain to just 1.5 percent of the market, from 0.05 percent, British officials said, but it would still have to meet existing standards and not be treated with growth hormones.
Mr. Bacus called the framework agreement a “good starting place” that would hopefully include “science-based” production standards, an implicit criticism that Britain’s standards are based on fear not science.
Pork and poultry are not part of the agreement, but Ms. Rollins said they were also “at the front of the line.” She added that, despite the concerns among Britons, chlorine washing was used for about 5 percent of chicken in the United States. Most American chicken is washed with peracetic acid, which is essentially a combination of hydrogen peroxide and vinegar.
Still, in Britain there is nervousness about any suggestion that food production standards could be relaxed.
The National Farmers’ Union of England and Wales applauded its government for sticking to its standards last week but added that they needed to be maintained as officials tried to negotiate tariffs on other goods, which are still set at 10 percent.
“Agriculture cannot be the pawn in trying to negotiate down further that 10 percent tariff,” said Tom Bradshaw, the president of the union. “We know the U.K. public value their high standards of domestic production, and we do not want to bring in chlorinated chicken or antimicrobial chicken. That is something that would be completely unacceptable.”
Mr. Bradshaw said there also needed to be clear assurances on the supply chain of American beef to prove it had not been treated with hormones.
In an early blow to the deal, Ken Murphy, the chief executive of Tesco, Britain’s biggest supermarket chain, told Reuters on Tuesday that the retailer would skip American beef and continue to sell only British and Irish beef.
“It has become a narrative that wasn’t well digested in the U.S., that their beef products are not good, are not safe,” Dr. Maciel said. Allowing more U.S. beef to enter the British market “wouldn’t mean that U.S. beef is fully equivalent to U.K. beef, but it would be symbolic in showing that U.S. products are not inherently inferior or unsafe.”
Eshe Nelson is a reporter based in London, covering economics and business news for The New York Times.
Kevin Draper writes about money, power and influence in sports, focusing on a range of topics, including workplace harassment and discrimination, sexual misconduct and doping. He can be reached at [email protected] or [email protected].
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