The Press and Journal (Inverness, Highlands, and Islands)
EU deal offer to Australia on the table
The EU has published details of its initial offer on food and agriculture as part of a potential trade deal with Australia. This will be discussed at a high-level meting of senior officials from both sides next month, with a view to concluding an early deal.
The offer is around reduced and zero tariffs phased in over time, with lamb, beef and dairy the controversial issues. It is complicated by the starting point for volumes being pre-Brexit, with the UK the biggest EU importer from the southern hemisphere.
Imports from Australia and New Zealand have always been controversial in Europe, particularly with the French and Irish.
The European Commission is determined to avoid a repeat of its Mercosur deal with South America, which after many years has still not been ratified by member states.
The EU offer to Australia on agriculture appears less generous than the widely criticised deal for the UK concluded by Liz Truss when she was trade minister.
The deal that allows Ukraine to export grain from Black Sea ports has been extended for a further two months. There had been fears Russia would pull out of this agreement and reintroduce its blockade of the ports, as part of its spring offensive against Ukraine.
However it relented at the last minute, restoring arrangements negotiated by Turkey and the United Nations. This will ease grain supply problems in many countries dependent on imports and at the same time give a boost to Ukrainian farmers.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says that while governments are pursuing environmental goals for agriculture there is a lack of co-ordinated thinking about the global economic impact of these policies.
It says that in an “interconnected world” the unilateral adoption of environmental policies can reduce farmers’ competitiveness and drive “pollution leakage” by exporting production.
The OECD has identified two policy routes to improve agriculture’s environmental performance while maintaining the benefits of global markets.
The first relies on environmental policies through regulations, which limit environmental impacts but create issues around competitiveness and leakage. The second involves policies acting on supply and demand, which limit competitiveness and leakage impacts but will be slower to deliver environmental gains.