The UK may not have left the EU yet, but our 1st international trade negotiations have started - to establish our WTO schedules. We focus on it for the latest @ECIPE publication - summary: not going smoothly, could do better 1/ ecipe.org/publications/t…
Now according to Liam Fox appearing before the @CommonsIntTrade committee 2 weeks ago, all is fine - the EU might have to show flexibility, but the UK's is being good and generous in maintaining existing WTO market access 2/ 
Unfortunately agriculture exporting countries see it differently. They think the UK approach of splitting quotas between UK and EU is in effect a loss of market access, as failing to account for x-EU trade, and loss of flexibility.. They are likely to object 3/
The UK is also failing to meet expectations of being more trade liberal than the EU on agriculture. As we know EU agriculture is heavily protected. Rather than taking the opportunity to do things differently, we are carrying on with the same approach 4/
Liam Fox has suggested countries that are unhappy should take this up in bilateral negotiations. This would rely on New Zealand, Australia, US settling for jam tomorrow, and other exporters not objecting, which seems unlikely 5/
The UK's original plan to merely certify schedules, as Liam Fox suggested, is unlikely to work. As then Minister of State Greg Hands admitted in a letter to the EU Scrutiny Committee in June 2018, which showed more realism 6/
Ironically, the only reason there has been detailed Parliamentary scrutiny of this negotiation is because of a related EU proposal. The EU scrutiny committee ask good questions. It should not be acceptable to have such an important negotiation without Parliamentary engagement 7/
Given we will face a negotiation, we should aim to move beyond the EU position and be more trade liberal, balancing this with a proper consideration of UK domestic interests - producer and consumer - and other country interests 8/
The UK government has just started consultations on bilateral agreements with Australia, NZ, and US - all major agricultural exporters. Given the WTO negotiations, this would be a good time for a wider debate on our future trade policy in agriculture 9/
Agriculture is never easy in international trade negotiations, bilateral or multilateral. Negotiations to date in the WTO should serve as a prompt for the UK to raise our game and be clearer in our asks - which we need to make a success of our independent trade policy 10/ ends
