Most Favoured Nation status should apply. Or what's called the BOOT: better off overall test.
Exclusion of the US from the AsiaPac trade round made everyone else better off! The US basically screws everyone: no Australian US trade agreement in recent history has been BOOT for Australia, US states also apply random rules which nullify much Australian trade advantages: BHP was blocked from building some minerals processing in California IIRC.
A rather anti US subtext in "love actually" is based on populist common belief: in trade negotiations cross administration the US is a 900lb gorilla bully.
The push back by farming lobbies in the UK to US chicken is an unusual example of holding ground. Consumer sentiment lined-up for once. Undoubtedly ammonia rinsed chicken would be cheaper.
Any agreement that does not make the parties better off overall is rejected because it is quite literally worse than nothing. That an agreement does not split gains equally between participants because they don’t have equal leverage in no way means that trade agreements freely entered into make the participants worse off.
The lived experience for most Australian trading is that bilats and multilats with the US are net negative. You have to take a view that things are only better if cheaper, even if you drive your own food security to the floor. It destroyed the Australian car parts sector, and ultimately Ford and GMH left Australia.
I’m not going to comment on lined experience as I understand Australia has the longest unbroken run without a recession of any country.
On food security
> not everything that Australians like to eat is produced here. So we import about 11% of the food and beverages we consume by value.
> The imports are mainly processed products (including coffee beans, frozen vegetables, seafood products, and beverages), along with small amounts of out-of-season fresh food.
Those seafood products imported destroyed our prawn fisheries on the east coast because of white spot disease. They entered the animal production food chain.
We had local canneries for pineapple and tinned fruit, we now import delmonte and dole pineapple and soft fruit in tins. It's a significant issue. The dairy sector is concerned over concentration on the China market has meant they ignored the local market and were now importing some dairy. Potato deregulation has caused significant worsening in the sector. We do supply an awful lot of Macca's chips so there's that. Most bacon is Canadian, however we export a huge amount of pork meat to the world. Ironically we produce the wrong ratio of fat to meat for bacon and cured meat products.
That conversation article is not wrong, but it's not impartial. ABERE's main focus is food export and industrial scale agriculture, we supply a huge amount of millet and soy to worldwide markets, as well as cattle and sheep meat.
Covid cost us migrant labour and we've (thankfully) had to stop ruinously bad piecework rates and moved to income guarantees to attract longterm labour from developing economies, replacing tourism and backpacker temporary labour. It's contributed to the huge CPI price increases we're now seeing.
It might be a good time, for the US agricultural sector to seek a bilat if they argue cheaper food, but the longterm consequences would make ABERE quake in their shoes.
25% of the Australian slaughterhouses are owned by JBS, a Brazilian company.
The other day I wanted to buy pickled cucumbers at the local Woolworths. They had a number of choices – but, interestingly, didn't matter what brand, almost every jar of them was made in India. They do normally stock one Australian-made brand (Westmont Pickles), but it was out of stock. Separate from the main section, they had a couple of other brands of pickles in the "international foods" section. Both were labelled as "Polish", and one was "Made in Poland", but the other one was made in India too.
They normally stock two different brands of Dolmades. I find it amusing that their cheap store brand is made in Greece, while the more expensive "named brand" is made in China.
I am going back tomorrow morning, to buy bacon. Now I feel the urge to check how true your "Most bacon is Canadian" statement is.
Yeah you are right. The highest Australian percentage I could find was 21% on Woolworths store brand. Interestingly, the more expensive “named brands” all had lower local content percentages than the cheaper store brand does.
Is the overseas content Canadian? Alas, the product packaging doesn’t say. I’d think, for something like bacon, they should have to state the country of origin of the major ingredient (which for bacon is obviously pork)
I know an ex-JDS employee who told me it's Canadian, and both because of cost of production and fat to meat ratio available from Australian pork production.
One other factor that article mentioned – Australian pork is more expensive than imported pork, in part due to tougher animal welfare standards driving up production costs. The article says Australian pork farmers hope the government might change the labelling laws, to make it harder to present foreign pork as being "Made in Australia". Maybe one day it will happen.
Exclusion of the US from the AsiaPac trade round made everyone else better off! The US basically screws everyone: no Australian US trade agreement in recent history has been BOOT for Australia, US states also apply random rules which nullify much Australian trade advantages: BHP was blocked from building some minerals processing in California IIRC.
A rather anti US subtext in "love actually" is based on populist common belief: in trade negotiations cross administration the US is a 900lb gorilla bully.
The push back by farming lobbies in the UK to US chicken is an unusual example of holding ground. Consumer sentiment lined-up for once. Undoubtedly ammonia rinsed chicken would be cheaper.