A trade deal is an agreement between countries designed to remove restrictions on goods and services traded between them.
The key area where trade and pesticides intersect is around the global trade in food which totals roughly $2 trillion per year. Countries set different safety limits for how much of a particular pesticide is allowed to appear in an item of food (this safety limit is known as a Maximum Residue Level).
Along with EU countries, the UK has tended to take a relatively precautionary approach to protecting human health from pesticides and so has set more stringent safety limits than other countries such as the US and Australia. As a result, much of the food produced in these countries contains pesticide residues which are too high to meet UK standards. This prevents companies from these countries exporting their produce to the UK. Trade partners therefore have much to gain by pressuring the UK to allow food imports containing higher levels of more toxic pesticides.
In recent years, trade deals have increasingly been used to push for ‘regulatory cooperation’, whereby joint standards are agreed between trading partners. Under this guise, the agrochemical industry and countries such as the US have made concerted attacks on the European approach to regulating pesticides and lobbied strongly for it to be weakened. The UK is already under considerable pressure to take a laxer approach to which pesticides it authorises for use. If the UK Government bows to these demands, then pesticides banned in the UK due to evidence that they impact negatively on human health or the environment could soon be used again in our farms and gardens.