NFU president: farmers are pawns in Brexit negotiations

theguardian.com:

The president of the National Farmers’ Union has accused the government of using British food producers as a “pawn” in post-Brexit trade deals.

Minette Batters, who has led the organisation representing British farmers since 2018, said “the most prized food market in the world” had been “handed over for nothing” by ministers, in their rush to sign wide-ranging free-trade agreements with Australia and New Zealand after the UK’s departure from the European Union.

Under the terms of the UK-Australia deal, which was signed in December, Australian beef and lamb farmers will gradually gain more access to the UK market over the first 10 years, before all tariffs and quotas on imported meat are removed. Similar arrangements have been agreed for Australian dairy products, with a five-year transition period, and eight years for sugar.

“It does feel like a betrayal,” Batters said in an interview with the Observer. “My greatest fear was that we would be used as a pawn in trade deals and effectively that is what’s happened.”

The nation’s food producers said they had been promised by successive environment secretaries, since Michael Gove held the post between 2017 and 2019, that any post-Brexit free-trade deals would include permanent protection for domestic food producers, in the event of a wave of imports.

“These are really bad trade deals for the UK because there are no checks and balances, she said. “We were promised as farmers that there would be forever-and-a-day safeguards, so if there was a problem, they could do something about it.”

Farmers have long feared that trade deals with food-exporting nations, such as Australia and New Zealand, would lead to a flood of cheaply produced meat, dairy and sugar arriving on British shores,