How the UK trade deal is giving Aussie farmers a sugar hit

afr.com:

London | On Wednesday evening (Thursday AEST), the cargo ship Port Macao sailed up the Thames River and berthed at the modest wharf beside Tate & Lyle’s sugar refinery – one of the last industrial buildings still standing, and working, in London’s docklands.

It’s not uncommon to see freighters sitting at Tate & Lyle’s wharf, unloading tens of thousands of tonnes of milled sugar into the factory’s cavernous hangars. But the Port Macao was special.

Tate & Lyle’s crane takes sugar from the hold of the freighter Port Macao, docked beside the company’s London refinery. Hans van Leeuwen

Eight weeks earlier, it had sailed out of Queensland with 33,000 tonnes of milled Australian raw cane sugar in its hold, extracted from the Burdekin region south of Townsville.

Any previous shipment from Australia of this size, worth perhaps $35 million, would have attracted a punishing tariff of about $18 million – enough to render it commercially unviable, and to stifle the Australia-UK sugar trade.

But thanks to the two countries’ free trade agreement (FTA), which came into force on May 31, this shipment was tariff-free.

“We’re unloading at the moment, as we speak, the very highest quality raw cane sugar from Queensland, in Australia, in the first vessel that we’ve brought to the United Kingdom under the new free trade agreement,” said Gerard Mason, the effervescent senior vice president of Tate & Lyle Sugars.

Both he and his counterparts at Queensland Sugar Limited hope it will be the first of many, as the FTA expands, and then scraps, the remaining sugar quotas in the coming eight years.

Sugar on barges at the Tate & Lyle refinery in 1922. 

This will mark a Brexit-powered renaissance for a historic trade relationship that goes all the way