As Scott Morrison arrived at No 10 Downing St to sign a free trade agreement with Boris Johnson he faced a volley of impolite questions from members of the local media.
“Have you come to kill British farms?” one yelled.
Prime ministers Scott Morrison and Boris Johnson walk to their joint press conference in the Downing Street garden.Credit:AP
It comes after a long campaign against the free trade deal from parts of the British farm sector in alliance with environmental groups.
Their argument has been that environmentally destructive Australian agricultural practices will not only lay waste to Britain’s agricultural sector, but to the landscape itself.
In May a group of 10 British environmental groups wrote to Mr Johnson attacking the pending deal.
“It feels inconsistent, to … be prioritising a deal – with a laggard on global climate action – that undermines high UK standards on the environment and animal welfare by forcing UK farmers to compete with outdated models of agricultural production,” they wrote.
Days later Australia’s High Commissioner to the UK George Brandis wrote to MPs rebutting what he called the “wild claims” of Britain’s National Farmers Union.
“Some of those claims are beyond absurd – for instance, the claim made in a Sunday newspaper that if the UK signs an ambitious free trade agreement with Australia, ‘our green and pleasant land would become like the Australian outback’,” Brandis wrote.
So are Australian agricultural practices worse than those of Britain? That depends on whom you ask and how you measure the outcomes.
Tim Beshara, manager of policy and strategy for the Wilderness Society, says there is undoubtedly a greater risk of an Australian agricultural product causing biodiversity damage than a similar British product, but notes this is in part because Australia still has biodiversity.
British forests were first subjected to clearing with the Roman conquest of AD 43.
“The biodiversity values in Australia are incomparable to the UK. One is a large continent of Gondwanan-origin whose variety of life has evolved in isolation for tens of millions of years and is like nothing else on the planet,” he says.
“The other is a small damp island whose entirety of lifeforms emigrated back from Europe after the place was wiped clean in the last ice age a mere 10 thousand years ago.”
As Mr Beshara put it in a recent speech to the Australian Farm Institute: “the UK has 32 native species of trees and shrubs full stop. Australia has 850 species of eucalypts alone”.
Mr Beshara argues Australia’s rich biodiversity confers upon us a special responsibility of stewardship, but by some measures Britain has greater protection standards.
Britain pays its farmers about $1.75 billions for green initiatives, compared with the Australian government’s spending of about $300 million per year related to biodiversity for the marine and terrestrial ecosystems, says Mr Beshara.
“Given Australia has such special flora and fauna, and that our government is unwilling to raise environmental standards, it’s inevitable that the environmental impact from Australian produce will on average be higher than that from the UK.”
Andrew McAndrew who has chaired an Australian Meat and Livestock Association taskforce on the free trade agreement dismisses some other assertions made by British farmers.
He says animals in both Australian and British herds are treated under similar international welfare standards. He says the argument Australian meat entering Britain may be grown with additive hormones is false, noting for decades those exports have been hormone free.
Mr McAndrew also says the carbon footprint of Australian and British meat is similar, pointing out that the Australian industry has set itself a net-zero target and improvements in feed and breeding processes has seen rapid declines in emissions from Australian meat.
But RSPCA senior policy officer Jed Goodfellow says British farmers are right to claim their animals are treated better. Unlike in Australia, pigs and chickens are no longer kept in extreme confinement in battery cages or sow stalls, he says.
Agriculture Minister David Littleproud is equally unimpressed by the concerns.
“It’s pretty obvious that the difference in our environments mean there will be differences in our land and animal management practices and to think there could be equivalency would have perverse outcomes,” he said.
“To put this into perspective my own electorate of Maranoa in Queensland is three times the size of the UK. The UK average rainfall is 1154 mm Maranoa ranges from 609mm to 230mm annually.
“It is like comparing apples with dried oranges.”
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