Post

Wondering what leverage in negotiations looks like? Australia's new FTA with the EU provides 16,830 tonnes of tariff free access for beef. Australia's FTA with the UK, completed with a desperate Johnson administration, provided 35,000 tonnes tariff free, rising to unlimited over 15 years.

Dmitry Grozoubinski

@explaintrade.com

You can simultaneously think beef tariffs are bad and accept that keeping them was something both the UK and EU government wanted to do, as manifest in these negotiations. Money is the root of all evil but if I lose all mine at poker it's fair to observe I suck at cards. bsky.app/profile/expl...

Dmitry Grozoubinski@explaintrade.com

Yeah. There are two separate things here: a) A policy argument about the wisdom of agricultural protectionism; and b) A negotiation observation about the fact that it was/is policy, and Australia was able to push the UK much further off it than it has been the EU.

24/3/26, 8:08 am7 reposts124 likes

Dorien James

@dorienjames.bsky.social

24 Mar

Bluesky scold here. 16,000 tonnes of beef means an extra 300,000 tonnes of CO₂ in the atmosphere, plus the same amount of methane. And nobody actually needs to eat the bloody stuff. So I think exorbitant beef tariffs are good actually, and should be levied on domestic production too.

Dmitry Grozoubinski

@explaintrade.com

24 Mar

To put that figure into perspective, UK domestic beef production last year was 937,000 tonnes. If your policy objective is driving down meat consumption then, as you say, a tax on all beef and not very selective tariffs is the way to do it.