The UK should not set minimum requirements on how its food imports are produced, a former Australian prime minister has said.

Tony Abbott, who was appointed as a trade policy adviser to the UK government in September, acknowledged that imports need to meet basic standards for food safety, but he suggested the likes of environmental and animal welfare standards are different.

“While its right and proper for Britain to say that food sold in Britain has got to meet particular standards, I don’t think it’s up to Britain to tell other countries how they have got to meet those standards,” he said.

“I would be confident that our standards are high, even if they may not be identical to British standards,” Abbott said during an online Oxford Farming Conference event.

Chlorine chicken

The debate around food import standards is often represented in the UK by chlorinated chicken, but responding to Abbott, Minette Batters from the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) argued that it is a much broader issue.

“It’s not about chlorine washing, that [chicken] is perfectly safe to eat. It’s about the method of production. It’s about how you choose to keep those animals,” she said.

“Here in the UK, 16% of costs to poultry producers are about laws on how you keep birds […] so at the end of all that, you don’t need to chlorine wash,” the NFU president said.

Batter’s main point was that the UK should not sign up to trade deals if they do not help address major global challenges, such as antibiotic resistance and climate change.

“We need a radical rethink about how this world chooses to trade in agricultural commodities,” the Wiltshire beef farmer said.

Tony Abbott took a different view: “If we try to solve every problem through trade deals, we will not do any trade deals.”