Two years ago the Australian beef industry and Australian Government agreed to the discriminatory splitting of the only tariff-free European Union quota for Australian Beef.
We conceded to allowing the USA to take an increasing majority of the quota.
Every year the USA would get more of the tariff-free quota, we would get less - and we agreed to this.
You may have heard me, I had a word or two to say about it at the time and not many of them positive.
The results of this atrocious decision are now coming to roost.
This week, our family company and our customers in Europe - another family company - will likely share a bill not much shy of $90,000 for a container that had the crime of docking a few days late.
Meanwhile, America will use less than 25 per cent of its available, sweetly carved out quota allocation.
The real kicker?
On June 30, at current rates of utilisation, about 12,000 tonnes of the US quota will expire unused.
The quota, carved out for exclusive use by the USA, is now unusable by Australia or the rest of the world.
This leaves our European customers without beef and without an opportunity to fill that demand.
Anyone who has attempted to ship anything around the world in the last two years of COVID would understand that trying to land a vessel on the other side of the world in a four-day window was a contortionist feat exceeding that of Houdini.
That is what Australian exporters to the EU beef quota have had to achieve since this change was implemented.
We managed to do it, load after load.
In fact our company and, indeed, our European clients haven't missed one quota period in the entire history of this quota.
Now, we've had the double whammy of delayed trans-shipments, combined with a backlog in the port in the Netherlands created by the sanctions on Russia and the associated stranded product.
So here we are, landing a product in a four-day window on the other side of the globe only to have it held up at the port in the Netherlands itself and miss the quota window.
I sent out a few tweets to express my disgust.
I garnered a response from the EU's Director General for Agriculture and the Director of International Affairs and Trade Negotiations in the EU.
His tweet in response was: "your government agreed (to) the quota. If you have practical problems in Rotterdam ask your embassy in NL, or here in Brussels, to intervene as we want legitimate trade to flow freely".
I've written to our embassy, I've written to our trade and agricultural departments.
Having to deal with this scenario in the current shipping environment is treacherous.
Watching 12,000 tonnes of quota simply extinguished in this same period, where we will pay this extraordinary penalty, is nothing short of heartbreaking.
At a time in the world where allies need to stick together, surely we can all come to a better arrangement that in the words of the Director from the EU himself say: "let legitimate trade flow freely".
- Josie Angus is a beef producer from central Queensland.
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