International trade agreements: agricultural and food products

Part of Agriculture Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 10:45 am on 20 November 2018.

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Photo of George Eustice George Eustice The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs 10:45, 20 November 2018

The amendments all seek to achieve the same thing: to set out in statute a requirement that no trade deal can be done or put before Parliament unless its terms mean that no good can be imported that does not meet our standards.

Before talking about the approach that we intend to take on future trade deals, I want to say first and foremost that this is an incredibly important issue. As a number of hon. Members highlighted, the Secretary of State and I could not have been clearer that we will not water down our trade and animal welfare standards in pursuit of a trade deal. The Department for International Development has now adopted that position unambiguously, despite what the hon. Member for Darlington said. It is clear that we will not water down our food standards in pursuit of a trade deal.

I want to make a number of points. First, the EU regulations on chlorine-washed chicken, hormone-treated beef and other standards are coming across through the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 and will sit as retained EU law. It will be unlawful to do a trade deal allowing hormone-treated beef or chlorine-washed chicken into the UK unless Parliament decides to repeal the legislation that bans its sale in the UK.

Secondly, we are obviously working on our future trade agreement with the European Union. The approach outlined in the Chequers proposal, which remains the basis for the UK’s approach in the development of a future economic partnership, is that we will have a common rulebook on issues pertinent to the border, which will include sanitary and phytosanitary issues. It is likely that a Bill giving effect to the future economic partnership will give additional protections in this space.

This is an important matter for another reason. The United Kingdom has been on a rather different journey from the United States—in particular, over the past 30 years. In the UK, there has been a growth of consumer interest in food provenance. Consumers want more labelling so they can understand how their food was produced. They want higher standards, and they have sought to purchase locally where possible. We have seen a growth in farmers markets and a much stronger consumer interest in the quality of food.

The US remains rather backward in this sense—it has not made those changes in recent decades. It has precious little legislation to protect farm animal welfare. There are virtually no federal laws at all. Even state by state, there is only patchy regulation. The hon. Member for Bristol East pointed out that the US is still too reliant on antibiotics and failing to make the kind of progress that we have. It has a long way to go to catch us up. That said, consumer driven trends in the US are making an impact. There is more interest in natural beef—non-hormone-treated beef. There is a growing demand among US consumers for organic beef. McDonald’s now has a British chief executive, who understands the importance of animal welfare. Standards of animal welfare in the US are being driven up as the terms of supply are dictated to big companies, such as McDonald’s. That is all starting to have a positive impact in the US, although it still has a long way to go.

This issue is important for another reason, which is most pertinent to us as we debate the Bill: we must not expose our producers to unfair competition. It would be wrong to have far higher regulatory standards here, but then undermine those standards and effectively export production to foreign countries with lower standards. That is why getting these issues right matters.

The approach we are taking is not to say, “Let’s try and put on the face of the Bill a requirement in this space,” because in a trade deal we need to consider things such as equivalence—they might not have identical regulations, but they might be equivalent in some circumstances. The approach we have taken is to look at the process of scrutiny of trade deals as they come back to Parliament.

There are a number of different models. In the European Union, the Commission first of all requests authorisation from the Council of Ministers to negotiate a trade agreement with a partner. Those are sometimes referred to as a mandate, because the Council will set out the parameters for that negotiation. When a deal is concluded the Commission returns to the Council and the European Parliament to seek agreement for that particular trade deal. The US has a similar approach, in which Congress delegates authority to the Trade Promotion Authority, which is an office within the presidency. Therefore, there is a mechanism whereby Congress can define the parameters and mandate of a trade deal, which finally returns to congress to either be vetoed or accepted, but it cannot be amended.