Ahead of what may be a final push for the Australia-European Union Free Trade Agreement negotiations, Aussie farmers have a clear message for Trade Minister Don Farrell: there should be no deal just for the sake of a deal.
The call comes as preliminary negotiations get underway in Brussels this week, ahead of a meeting on the sidelines of the G7 Trade Ministers’ meeting in Osaka next week.
Negotiations for a free trade agreement were launched in mid 2018, with talks stalling in July of this year over naming rights to key products such as Prosecco and Feta that would have hurt domestic Australian producers, while imports of beef, lamb, dairy and sugar remained constricted.
With the EU holding firm on its highly restrictive quota position, the Australian red meat industry is urging the minister to continue the mission of ‘levelling the playing field’ for Australian beef and sheepmeat access to the EU.
A-EU Red Meat Market Access Taskforce chair Andrew McDonald said our case for seeking and securing significant trade reform was compelling.
"The EU is one of the world's largest meat consumers and in order to service this demand, there is an ongoing import requirement," Mr McDonald said.
"Australia's trading relationship with the EU is based on shared values and is heavily focused on meeting EU customer demand for high quality red meat products.
"However, our ability to service the market is severely limited due to the EU’s maintenance of outdated, inequitable and restrictive quotas and high tariffs.
"This access has been largely unaltered for nearly 50 years; but to make matters worse, it has actually been eroded while we’ve been negotiating the FTA."
With competitor nations having recently improved their access to the market, Mr McDonald said despite the challenges, it was imperative negotiators got this right.
"Agreeing to a sub-optimal outcome will set back any reform to our trade framework to the EU for the foreseeable future and detrimentally impact our trade resilience and diversification for decades to come,” he said.
“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for our industry to improve our market access and we’re looking to Minister Farrell and his government to maintain the resolve, even if that takes the negotiations beyond an end October timeline."
It's a sentiment the National Farmers' Federation has echoed, with president Fiona Simson saying farmers were fearful of being sold out at the 11th hour.
“We have grave concerns that Minister Farrell is headed to Osaka with his signing pen at the ready," Ms Simson said.
“We’re yet to hear any indication that the EU is willing to put a commercially-meaningful deal on the table.
“Everything we’ve seen so far would actually send parts of our sector backwards; we’ve never seen a proposed trade deal like it.
“The message from Australian farmers is clear and united: if it’s a dud deal, keep the signing pen in your pocket."
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s
