Tesco has confirmed that there are no plans to source American beef despite the recent UK-US trade deal.
Last week’s deal gave US farmers a quota of 13,000 metric tonnes of beef that meet UK standards.
But Tesco’s CEO, Ken Murphy, explained why the major supermarket brand would not be using American beef.
He said: ‘We source 100% Irish and British beef in Tesco and for the foreseeable future that policy will be the same, we’re not planning to change it.’
But US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins took a slightly different tone last week.
He said American beef is ‘the safest, the best quality and the crown jewel of American agriculture’ and predicted the trade deal would ‘exponentially increase’ US beef exports to Britain.
But American beef could struggle to find a market here in the UK if the biggest supermarkets are not happy to use it.
Tesco is a market leader in the country, with a 28% share in the country’s grocery market.
Sainsbury’s, which has 15% of the market, also sources all of its beef from Britain and Ireland.
What is the UK-US trade deal?
Sir Keir Starmer praised Donald Trump when the trade deal was announced last week and described it as ‘truly historic’.
The deal commits the US to an alternative agreement for tariffs on UK automobile products.
The first 100,000 vehicles imported from UK manufacturers into the US have a 10% reciprocal rate imposed, and additional vehicles the same year have 25% imposed.
It also includes more than $700million in ethanol exports as well as $250million on agricultural products including beef.
Other parts of the deal include a new trading union for steel and aluminium, with the US recognising ‘the economic security measures taken by the UK to combat global steel excess capacity’.
Trump said the deal would be ‘full and comprehensive’ in a post on his Truth social media platform.
But this deal would not be a free trade agreement of the kind that has been promised by previous governments since Brexit.
The 10% baseline tariffs on all imports to the US will be going nowhere but Trump indicated there could be room for manoeuvre with the higher tariffs on products like cars and steel and the movie tariffs.
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