At first light I walked our Belted Galloway cows down from the hill, through the avenue of oak trees that shadow the lane, to the valley bottom. The first ones will start calving next week, and I want them to be near the farmhouse where we can supervise them. This birthing is timed carefully to coincide with the spring flush of grass and herbs that the cows will need to produce milk for their calves.
My family has worked in farming for 600 years or more, since before Columbus “discovered” America. So imagine my reaction when I saw Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, ranting on Fox News about European beef: “I mean, [the] European Union won’t take chicken from America. They won’t take lobsters from America. They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak.”
Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade advisor (and allegedly the “guru” behind his trade wars), was also venting on TV about “non-tariff barriers”, such as food safety standards, which keep American food products out of Europe and the UK. Many common American agricultural practices, including washing raw chicken in chlorine, feeding growth hormones to cattle, or growing GM crops, are banned in Britain and the EU, making it difficult for these countries to import US produce. And the Americans aren’t happy about this.
With a UK-US trade deal expected any day now, British farmers are on tenterhooks. Navarro is suggesting that any trade deal would require the UK to accept America’s “chlorinated chicken” and beef produced with hormones. And Labour’s inner circle appears to be preparing the ground to sign: last week, Chancellor Rachel Reeves shockingly called a “Buy British” campaign “insular” and “narrow-minded”. Meanwhile, Business Minister Jonathan Reynolds has promised that Britain’s food safety standards will not be relaxed as part of a deal — even in return for a reduction in tariffs. But this is a problematic pledge because it isn’t our food safety standards that are the issue: this is about whether we enforce our standards on imported American food stuffs.
The trouble is that, if we allow American food into Britain that has been produced with banned pesticides, or in unhygienic factory farms, or from pigs in farrowing crates, then we have to let British farmers use those same methods to compete on price, or else we lose our farms because of the unfair competition. An unfavourable deal could see British farming become a “race to the bottom” to compete on price with the American Midwest.
“An unfavourable deal could see British farming become a ‘race to the bottom’ to compete on price with the American Midwest.”
That said, there’s no denying an American trade deal could cheer up our ailing economy. Trade between the UK and US is fairly well balanced and is worth about £315 billion, supporting 2.5 million jobs. And America is Britain’s single largest trading partner, albeit way smaller than the combined EU27 as a market.
But while I’ve read the economic textbooks, and I understand the theory behind free trade, I also know that the real world is rarely as simple as a textbook. There are many sensible, real-world reasons why Britain doesn’t have free trade in some vital products and services. If we want to protect domestic car or steel production, or the producers of military hardware for national defence, for instance, then we often quite rightly find ways to shield them from market forces. We don’t want to be dependent on foreign countries for goods that are vital to the national interest.
When it comes to British agriculture, there are equally good reasons to limit free trade — especially with America. For a cautionary tale, just look at Mexico. The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) was ostensibly a free-trade agreement, but its impact on Mexico has been devastating.
Over the past decade, Mexico has been working to reduce the use of genetically modified/biotech corn and glyphosate — the ingredient in Monsanto’s weed-killing product, Roundup. This was partly to protect public health, since thousands of lawsuits have been lodged against the makers of Roundup claiming it causes cancer. And it was partly to protect the environment. Mexico erected barriers to American GM/biotech crop imports, and began to regulate the use of glyphosate in its farming systems.
The companies affected, Bayer-Monsanto, and Mexico’s National Agricultural Council (CNA), filed in 2021 for an injunction in Mexican courts to stop the regulations. Then, in 2023, the US government escalated the situation by pressuring Mexico to drop the domestic regulations. By imposing domestic standards on American imports, the US argued, Mexico had formed a “barrier to trade” and therefore violated the free-trade deal. In short, the Americans have used the deal and trade legislation to strong-arm Mexico into diluting its agricultural standards.
And herein lies a warning to the UK. For Americans, “free trade” now means they have the right to sell us goods produced in ways we may deem unsafe, and in ways we may even have banned domestically, and if we try to resist, they will come after us, calling this “non-tariff cheating”. They could demand, in time, that we reshape our domestic laws and regulations on the environment and public health, or else allow them to flagrantly flout the same regulations.
There are, of course, a bunch of good folks saying that we have nothing to worry about, because “we don’t have to buy American chicken or beef in the supermarket”, and that this is all an issue of “consumer choice”. But you really shouldn’t believe this.
Free-market evangelists in the Trump administration and elsewhere believe that even “nutrition labelling” is an illegal “barrier to trade”. There is an ongoing dispute between America and the EU about this very issue. The product labels aren’t going to make it clear that you are eating American chlorinated chicken or hormone beef, or GM crops, or products grown with UK-banned pesticides, or dyed with UK-banned colourings that might make your kids hyper.
They don’t want you, the consumer, to be able to make that informed decision, just as they don’t want American consumers to know what they are eating. Informed consumer choice becomes effectively impossible — unless you have the time, money, and education to recognise and buy the good stuff. This line of argument also ignores the fact that lots of this produce will vanish into the food chain as ingredients.
Before we really get into it, though, it’s worth saying that most American food is fairly safe, and some American farmers (especially those behind regenerative agriculture efforts) are really good at what they do. But there are aspects of the mainstream American food system that are substantially different to our own, and those differences affect both food quality and safety.
Let’s start with the chickens. The issue isn’t the chlorine, but the fact that the chemical has to be used in the first place because American farms and food production facilities are bigger, faster, and therefore dirtier than those in Britain and the EU. That means more chickens squeezed in industrial-sized sheds, and faster factory-processing lines for killing and cutting up birds. The faster the factory processing line is, the more money the facility makes. Yet it also means the meat is more likely to carry disease. American chicken needs to be chlorine or acid-washed at the end of the production chain to kill the bacteria resulting from the process — otherwise that bacteria will go on to make humans sick.
And Americans do fall sick more often because of their government’s laxer food rules. According to the charity Sustain, more than 14% of Americans get sick at least once a year from food poisoning — that’s roughly 10 times the comparable figure for the UK. The rates of food-borne illnesses resulting in death are also much higher in the US, where around 380 people die each year from foodborne salmonella. The Food Standards Agency has declared that it’s now safe to eat a soft-boiled egg in Britain (if it’s British Lion-marked), while the US Food and Drug Administration recommends hard-boiling eggs only in America due to salmonella fears. Why would we choose to put British children in greater danger of food poisoning by importing American produce?
Another vital issue is the five-fold greater usage of antibiotics in US agriculture. British farmers are banned from using antibiotics in feed as American farmers often do. Why? Because it is estimated that, by 2050, 10 million extra people will die annually from drug-resistant superbugs. It is feared that some of these superbugs will emerge from dirty, moist, and warm industrial farm sheds where antibiotics are being used to promote animal growth.
Most British people don’t want to eat worse quality food just to please the Americans. And yet the danger is that an American “free trade” deal would undermine Britain’s ability to set its own safe and sustainable domestic food standards, which take into account both public health and the environment. This would represent nothing less than a capitulation of our food sovereignty.
The irony is that, once upon a time, Brexiteers were agitated by the EU dictating trading terms to us — enforcing rules regarding the shape of bananas and so on. But what few seemed to understand was that American “free trade” policies work in a similar way, dictating how and what you can do domestically, both in terms of buying and selling, but also, curiously, how you do things in your own country. It should be clear to everyone that when the Americans talk about “free trade”, they mean that we will trade on their terms, with their standards as a guide.
If our government holds to our historic red lines, protecting Britain, then the Trump administration won’t sign the deal. If we do give up on our red lines, then we will have a trade deal but will have done irreversible damage to our country.
I love many things about America. I respect the best of what that country and its people can do. But they can go to hell if they want to exploit and bully us. Starmer should grow a pair, and hold firm to our red lines, and, if necessary, send the American negotiators packing. But I’ll wager he doesn’t do that. I reckon he’ll fold and sign the deal. There is no evidence so far that he understands or cares a hoot for British food, farming or the environment. I hope I’m wrong, but I think my farm, my beautiful cows, and this green and pleasant land are about to be sold down the river.
