Britain and Australia have agreed “in principle” to a free-trade agreement, the British government announced on Tuesday, a deal that will eventually eliminate tariffs between the two countries.
It is Britain’s first major trade deal since it left the European Union and the agreement was reached in just under a year of negotiations.
Details of the agreement haven’t been published yet, but the government said it would include a cap on tariff-free imports for 15 years, a measure intended to appease British farmers concerned about a flood of beef and sheep imports from Australia. The deal will remove Australia’s 5 percent tariff on Scotch whisky exports. The agreement will also allow Britons under the age of 35 to travel and work in Australia more easily, the government said.
“It is a fundamentally liberalizing agreement,” Liz Truss, the secretary of state for international trade, said in a statement. “That removes tariffs on all British goods, opens new opportunities for our services providers and tech firms, and makes it easier for our people to travel and work together.”
The deal was finalized over dinner at Downing Street, the British prime minister’s residence, on Monday as Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, is in Britain following the Group of 7 meetings.
The free-trade agreement has been entirely negotiated since Britain formally left the European Union in January 2020. Britain has signed scores of other trade agreements recently but these, such as the one with Japan, mostly replicated pre-Brexit market access.
The Australia deal is part of Britain’s broader trade ambitions, including joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade pact signed by 11 countries after President Donald J. Trump pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Australia is a founding member that agreement, and Britain’s process for joining began in early June.
Since Brexit, Britain has been eager to prove that it’s an outward-looking nation, actively embodying its “Global Britain” slogan. But the urgency with which it is looking to write new trade agreements has recently come under attack by food and agricultural groups, who fear that the government will allow in products with lower production standards.
Scott Walker, the chief executive of the National Farmers Union Scotland, said the industry had been told there would be safeguards in the deal but “there’s not been much detail on what they will mean in practice.”
One of the main concerns for farmers in Scotland is that Australians use a cattle farming system that allows for larger-scale production, with more cattle in a smaller space than is permissible in Britain, Mr. Walker said. This could undercut Scottish beef farmers. He said that the Australian trade deal alone was not the biggest problem, but the fear that trade negotiators in New Zealand and the United States would want to replicate this agreement next.
“We see this as just the start of what could be huge difficulties ahead for the industry in the United Kingdom,” Mr. Walker said.
In Australia, the deal has been welcomed by the meat and wine industries, two of the industries expected to gain the most from the agreement.
“It is just the tonic the Australian wine sector has needed as it moves quickly to reposition itself after the market into China was closed by the imposition of prohibitive tariffs,” Tony Battaglene, the chief executive of Australian Grape and Wine, the country’s national association for wine producers, said.
Patrick Hutchinson, the chief executive of the Australian Meat Industry Council, said, “This is a great opportunity for the Australian red meat industry.”
June 15, 2021 at 06:06PM
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Britain Signs Major Trade Deal With Australia, Its First After Brexit - The New York Times
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