Why chlorinated chicken is about to return as hot topic on political menu

It doesn’t matter if the nation we mean is the UK or Scotland. In the next couple of months, commercial decisions will quite likely be taken which, on the one hand, start to steer the UK off into a novel trading system. It will be separate from the European one, but will encompass many rivals we have hardly seen for a long time, especially in the Americas and in Asia.

Or else, Scots will need to strive all the more sturdily to forge a future focused on a re-union with Europe and its strategic implications.

On the surface of these movements of history is the relatively superficial matter of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s efforts to reach agreement on free trade with Australia. The formal negotiations, already well under way, are meant to reach a successful conclusion in time to be announced to the meeting of the G7 in Cornwall at the end of July.

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If this sequence works, the UK will move towards its post-Brexit mode in the membership of a trading bloc that will eventually comprise also the US and several booming Asian economies with vast consumer markets and ample funds for investment. With them it makes political and economic sense if the UK Government aims for zero tariffs and quotas in the final deal, perhaps after 20 years of gradual progress towards it.

The first big post-Brexit trade pact with Australia would therefore be an important symbolic prize because it would not merely roll over the arrangements we had in the EU.

Australia is a founder member of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which in its subtitle modestly claims to be comprehensive and progressive. We would be proclaiming we were headed that way too. Superoptimists of the Johnsonian type would look forward to the day when we were nobody’s offshore island, but one of the lords of the rims (the Pacific Rim, the Arctic Rim and so on) who carry most of the world’s trade.

Compared to the view from London, the view from Edinburgh looks not so simple. The EU trading system we have been in since 1973 has worked out well for us. We sell Europeans their whisky and salmon while they send us the cars we drive. On the whole, we have all been happy. With Brexit, however, these commercial relationships of half-a-century must be recast.

In part, Johnson sold voters the concept of Brexit with a pledge that it would free the UK to make “buccaneering” trade deals round the world. Six months later that vision is running up against the hard realities of the tricky compromises it demands. The planned agreement with Australia has already split the Cabinet in London between idealistic free-traders and those who fear some unwelcome effects for our farmers.

The fear arises just because the Australian deal is a stalking horse for an American deal. The US lets its industrial meat producers wash slaughtered birds in chlorine or other disinfecting acids in order to kill the food-poisoning bugs they often carry, having been fouled by chicken faeces during processing. Persuading British negotiators to drop a ban on this method and accept US food standards is a high priority in Washington for any trade deal with London.

This particular US agricultural export has come to the fore because it entails much broader arguments about the future regulation of trade between the different economic power blocs. The US is the biggest global producer of poultry, even in the visibly filthy cesspits of its farms, feebly controlled by chlorine washes. Nearly one-fifth of what it produces is exported. Its lower welfare standards let it achieve some of the world’s cheapest output.

For the negotiations, if we all accept that the producer is an adequate regulator of the trade, then agriculture could boom, to the benefit of poor rural regions in all countries.

If the consumer regulates, then they will stay poor, especially if pandemics recur (as is quite likely). It is in any case a hard sell. Most British consumers associate chlorine with the bleach they pour down their lavatory pans.

SHOULD the UK Government give way on the hygiene of production, it will need refusal by consumers to limit the money-grubbing methods of the most ruthless competitors. It would be a terrible outcome if nothing but another pandemic could put a stop to them.

One likelihood must be that in times when living standards are being squeezed, poorer British consumers will gladly buy up cheap food from overseas. Nothing wrong with that, you might say, but the big reason for the protection is that our farmers will go bust without it.

In general, agricultural prices will fall because under any such agreement our market will be flooded by cheap produce from countries that do not bother with the EU’s complex and costly structure of protection. That is especially true in Scotland where all farming (except for dairy produce) is precarious.

A reason for its being precarious is that we do get months like the May just past, the coldest in 25 years and with 30% more rain than usual. Since broad acres of the country offer little of a living to their people except on precarious farms, it looks as if these broad acres could become depopulated as the returns to farmers fall.

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Only about one-quarter or one-third of the land in Scotland can be cultivated anyway. The rest of it is mountain, moor and rough grazing. As more and more of this land reverts to the condition that Mother Nature left to us, the cost of farmland will suffer a disastrous fall. This year, it has been selling on average at £7000 an acre, after a long period of steadily rising prices, from about £2000 an acre at the turn of the century.

The most likely sequel is that the land will be bought for a song by European agribusiness. The French food conglomerate Carrefour already has link-ups with UK retailers, Tesco in the high street and Ocado online. It will see here a way into every shopping basket in the UK. The absentee landlord will become even more absent.

There may yet be some hope that the UK Government will defer to those home consumers who oppose buying the products of American farms. Chlorinated chicken also remains totemic in talks between the UK and the EU about their post-Brexit relationship, because the EU has inserted a new clause into its negotiating mandate. It will require the UK to maintain a ban on poultry treated with disinfectant if it wants a trade deal with its nearest neighbours.

It would truly be a Johnsonian farce if the international standing of the UK gets mixed up with chicken poo. But it looks as if things may turn out that way. For Scotland, the right response is to stand our ground on produce of the highest quality, created on farms of the best practice for customers of the most discerning kind. They will be many even in a world of Kentucky Fried Chicken.