Britain has an appetite for American food – a trade deal must recognise this

Trade negotiations have a knack of turning provincial problems into international imbroglios. We are less than a week into talks between the United Kingdom and the United States on a forthcoming free trade agreement, and one might be forgiven for thinking that food safety was the only item on the agenda. The kind of high-standards agreement which the UK needs to get from its closest ally will cover everything from insurance regulation to jet-engine manufacturing – but on these issues, we hear crickets. Or rather, clucking.

Agriculture is a notoriously tricky area for trade negotiators; it has the power to capture the public’s imagination and there is often a powerful set of vested interests at home. Witness the Canada-EU agreement, a deal seven years in the making which almost crumbled under the weight of a few thousand farmers in Belgium. Agriculture is also one of the most important issues on the table for most countries in the world – without progress on food, it is difficult to accomplish much else. This is especially true for the UK, whose “gains” in trade agreements will come from the most difficult areas of negotiation, namely advanced financial services provisions.

The Cabinet is reportedly split on whether to allow increased imports of American food as part of a potential US-UK agreement. It would be foolhardy in the extreme to think that any meaningful deal could exclude agricultural products. A belligerent “no” on American food is saying “no” to the deal itself.

Which brings us to the crux of the matter: is American food actually dangerous? The answer is again a resounding no. Increased imports of food from anywhere in the world would create more competition for British farmers, and the European farmers who currently have a stranglehold on exports to the UK. But in the case of US-made food, this competition is derived from the fact that Americans are more efficient producers and not because the food itself is of a lower standard.

Anti-globalisation activists (some of whom work in the European Commission) propagate a mythology around US agriculture which conjures up images of whole chickens being dunked into swimming pools of chlorine as part of the assembly line, and hormone-heavy cows ready for their Mr Universe debut. They claim that food prepared by any standard other than the European Union’s is fundamentally unsafe for human consumption. This is, again, patently untrue. That is not my judgment – it’s the judgment of the European Food Safety Authority. In 2005, it declared that poultry washed with chlorine dioxide as a pathogen reduction treatment is “of no safety concern”. In fact, use of chlorine as a pathogen reduction treatment can cut the incidence of salmonella, which causes more hospitalisations than any other pathogen-related illness in the UK.

Scaremongers on hormone-treated beef have a similarly steep hill to climb. The EU’s ban on imports of beef products treated with growth promotants was found to be without

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion scientific merit and therefore in violation of its World Trade Organisation commitments in 1998. Nearly 20 years on, this unscientific trade restriction remains in place. If Britain chose to maintain this policy post-Brexit, it would likely face retaliatory tariffs on some of its most profitable exports to the United States. Brexit represents an extraordinary opportunity to step out of the EU’s shadow and to move towards a science-based agriculture policy. We should not allow ourselves to be scared off by those who would like to see the entire Brexit process stopped.

Underpinning this discussion is an article of faith in modern British society: choice is good. In choice we have freedom. Choice begets individuality, which is premised on one’s ability to express preferences. Choice, in the case of food, tends to improve quality and variety while simultaneously driving down prices, forcing producers to compete to offer the best products to customers. A new trade policy, in which strict labelling requirements were married to a less restrictive import policy, would help to combat food price inflation, which is currently at a three-year high. It would also bring immediate relief to the millions of Britons who are food insecure: 5.3million have trouble putting adequate amounts of food on the table; of those, 2.4million will occasionally go an entire day without eating.

These numbers are appalling, but do not stem from an intractable problem. The full promise of a free-trade agreement with the United States is not just cheaper cars or clothes, or deeper capital markets – it is a Britain more whole, and less hungry.

The young have just had their first brush with the brutal cynicism of politics. Those of us fearful that a Labour government will lead inexorably to Venezuela-style ruin will have welcomed the downgrading of the party’s £100billion pledge to wipe out student debt to a mere aspiration. But it will have come as a cold shower to the countless others who were led to believe that Jeremy Corbyn plays by different rules to other politicians.

Or will it? The contention is that once young people realise that the bribes will never materialise, they will vote for a party honest about the disastrous long-term state of the public finances. But it is far more likely is that they’ll continue their march Left, unless we address a problem that anyone who believes in aspiration will be squeamish about tackling: too many go to university.

Tony Blair’s target of getting 50 per cent into university was a pernicious exercise in social engineering. A graduate degree does not necessarily lead to a graduate job. There is a chasm, for example, between the number achieving legal degrees and those receiving training contracts. Where do they end up? Presumably in careers far less lucrative than the law.

This is not true everywhere: there is huge demand for engineers and scientists, and evidence that higher tuition fees have incentivised students to take courses more likely to result in better pay. But given that universities

‘Choice, in the case of food, tends to improve quality and variety while driving down prices forcing producers to compete’

‘Just 7 per cent of academics voted Tory in the last election, with more than 80 per cent backing Left-wing parties’

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion