The American Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue, has just completed a European mini-tour which took him to Italy, the Netherlands as well as to Belgium, where he visited a farm and met three European commissioners, including that at Commerce. The arrival of Sonny Perdue on the Old Continent is no coincidence of the calendar.
Discussions are indeed underway between the United States and the Europeans on the conclusion of a partial trade agreement, which will relate in particular to agricultural products. It’s invariable on the part of the Americans: every trade agreement concluded since President Donald Trump declared a trade war on the whole Earth two years ago has a broad “agriculture” component. And it is almost a one-way street since it is a question of selling to the other party a maximum of American agricultural products.
And, although he refrains from being part of the negotiators of the future preliminary US-EU trade agreement – which we expect in the coming weeks, it is said – it is this nail that came to drive Sonny Perdue. The climate-skeptical septuagenarian, one of the few survivors of Donald Trump’s initial government, obviously had only two messages to send to the European media. He placed them over and over again, seizing every opportunity, including when questions asked by journalists had little bearing on the subject.
The first is the need to reduce the abysmal American agricultural trade deficit with Europe. “It is between 10 and 12 billion dollars, while there are twice as many American consumers as Europeans. We believe that it doesn’t make sense that it’s unbearable and unreasonable“he said Thursday in a conference call with reporters.
The second message from the Americans is more difficult. It concerns the difference in standards of agricultural products on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, you can prick oxes with hormones. Chickens can be washed with chlorine, which Sonny Perdue denies, which evokes the use of vinegar. You can water crops with dozens of pesticides banned in the European Union. Genetically modified soybeans can be grown. And it is these products, among others, that lie at the heart of negotiations on the future trade agreement.
We know from experience that Europe refuses to conclude bilateral treaties including agricultural products whose standards are lower than those it imposes on its producers. Sonny Perdue never stopped hammering: “Our products are of high quality. They respect international standards. We don’t want to sell you products that Americans have not been consuming for a long time“.
The Europeans will, in any event, have to conclude a trade treaty with the Americans, at the risk, if not, to see terrible reprisals falling on them, like heavy taxes on the exports to the United States of cars and a host of other products. Donald Trump’s nuisance capacity is immense, but, we dare believe, not to the point of forcing the European Union to lower its standards on agricultural products. Sonny’s battle seems lost in advance.
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