By Matthew Knott, Paul Sakkal, Nick Bonyhady and Benjamin Preiss
Farmers have backed calls for an independent inquiry into the scrapping of a longstanding ban on beef imports from the United States, after cattle producers told a review they feared beef from risky countries could enter Australia under the new rules.
While the Albanese government insisted its decision on beef imports was based on science and unrelated to the tariff negotiations, the Trump administration hailed a major trade victory that would “make agriculture great again”.
Wagyu beef farmer Nick Sher on his Ballan farm, north-west of Melbourne. He isn’t worried about the change.Credit: Jason South
The Coalition is demanding more detail, saying it feared the government was trading away Australia’s strict biosecurity regulation to help score a trade deal with US President Donald Trump.
US Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins issued a statement congratulating the president on “the major trade breakthrough” and saying it would “make agriculture great again”.
“This is yet another example of the kind of market access the president negotiates to bring America into a new golden age of prosperity, with American agriculture leading the way,” she said.
Rollins insisted American beef was safe and claimed Australia’s trade barriers had not been based on science, saying: “Gone are the days of putting American farmers on the sidelines.”
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins (left), pictured with President Donald Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr in May, hailed the breakthrough.Credit: AP
Agriculture Minister Julie Collins and Trade Minister Don Farrell said repeatedly on Thursday that Australia’s decision was not related to the trade talks and had been years in the making.
The US National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the peak lobbying group for American beef producers, said it was “pleased that president Trump has successfully opened the Australian market to American beef.”
“For 20 years, US beef was denied access to Australia while Australia exported $US29 billion ($44 billion) of beef to US consumers,” the association’s president Buck Wehrbein said, adding the issue had “been a sticking point for many years”.
Since 2019, Australia has allowed US beef into the country, but blocked meat from cattle born in Mexico and Canada before being slaughtered in America. This effectively meant all beef from the continent was blocked because US supply chains are highly integrated. No US beef has been imported since 2019.
This masthead revealed last month that the Albanese government was considering lifting the restrictions on US access to Australia’s beef market via a biosecurity review amid trade talks between the two countries over Trump’s 10 per cent import tariff.
Collins said the government would not compromise on biosecurity, and that the change to import rules came after a detailed departmental review.
Asked repeatedly if the call was triggered by Trump’s claims earlier this year that Australia was blocking US beef, Collins said the review process pre-dated Trump.
“This decision has been purely based on the science and a rigorous assessment by my department,” she said.
Australia began reviewing American beef imports in 2015, and in 2020 the US applied for expanded access to include cattle raised in Canada and Mexico but slaughtered in the US.
Collins did not directly answer questions on the nature of US assurances around traceability measures for cattle born in Mexico or Canada that are then slaughtered in the US.
The federal government has previously estimated a foot-and-mouth outbreak could cost the economy $80 billion.
Cattle Australia, in its submission to the biosecurity review that preceded the government’s decision, said it held concerns about the traceability of cattle entering the US from Mexico, particularly if those cattle were initially imported from Central America.
In 2019, Mexico signed an agreement to import cattle from Guatemala, which is deemed a more risky country by US officials. Those cows are not allowed into the US or Australia.
US rules stipulate that cattle from Mexico are branded with the letter “M” to mark their provenance, but Australian cattle groups expressed fears about opening the local market to Mexican beef.
“Cattle Australia does not believe that the US currently can provide an equivalent level of individual lifetime animal traceability (for animals imported specifically from Mexico) to that of the Australian system,” the association said in its submission.
“These products must be accurately and clearly labelled in order to provide Australian consumers with the ability to make informed choices.”
Cattle Australia chief executive Will Evans said on ABC radio on Thursday that he was not thrilled with the decision but acknowledged it had been done via a scientific process and was aligned with Australia’s position as an open trading nation.
Nationals leader David Littleproud called for an independent scientific panel review into the government’s move after he received a briefing he said could not answer key questions.
“I back the industry to have an independent scientific panel to actually review that science,” Littleproud said.
Littleproud said precedent for such a panel was put in place when he was agriculture minister handling a white spot disease outbreak.
“It looks as though [biosecurity] has been traded away to appease Donald Trump,” Littleproud said earlier on ABC radio.
National Farmers’ Federation president David Jochinke backed Littleproud’s call for an independent inquiry, saying the organisation respected the government’s decision but said the industry should be given more information on how it was made.
“We want to ensure that Australian producers have confidence in the system, and we don’t get that confidence if we don’t understand how either the decision is made or ultimately why the decision was put through this time frame,” Jochinke said.
Michael Ward, the chair of veterinary public health and food safety at the University of Sydney, said: “I’m a bit perplexed at why we’ve seen this change. I think there’s a need for more transparency to maintain confidence in the system.”
Trump and members of his administration have criticised Australia’s beef import rules.
“Our farmers are blocked from selling almost anywhere ... Australia won’t let us sell beef,” US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in April.
Farrell told reporters on Thursday that his US counterparts had not raised the beef issue in recent trade talks, sticking to the government line that the beef switch was unrelated to tariffs.
In Ballan, north-west of Melbourne, beef producer Nick Sher said he doubted US beef would be enticing for Australian consumers because it would probably be more expensive.
“The quality of what we produce would be better than what we could import from the US,” he said. “I can’t see it hitting the supermarket shelves.”
Meat & Livestock Australia managing director Michael Crowley said the impact of US and Canadian beef entering Australia would be minimal, citing Australians’ preference for locally produced meat.
NSW Farmers association biosecurity committee chair Tony Hegarty said the Albanese government needed to explain what evidence it had used to make the decision.
“We want to see the evidence that Australia will remain free of biosecurity risks that only a few weeks ago, the Albanese government wasn’t budging on,” Hegarty said.
With Daniel Lo Surdo, Brittany Busch and Nick Newling
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