“If you have additional trade barriers it could cause … reshuffling of global markets,” said Kimberly Crewther, executive director of representative body Dairy Companies Association of New Zealand.
New Zealand is the world’s largest exporter of dairy products and also a production base for foreign companies including French dairy producer Danone.
“We always prefer to see situations where trade is stable and certain … Markets don’t like uncertainty,” Crewther added.
The EU was China’s second-largest source of dairy products with at least 36 per cent of the total value of imports in 2023, only behind New Zealand, according to Chinese customs data. Australia was its third-largest exporter.
While it remains unclear which products China could target for retaliation, whey powder, cream and fresh milk were the top items in the EU’s €1.7 billion (US$1.8 billion) worth of dairy exports to China last year, according to data from the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development, which cited Eurostat.
Countries including the Netherlands, France, Germany, Ireland and Denmark have the largest dairy industry exposure to the Chinese market.
The Netherlands, Denmark and France are also major suppliers of pork, though Spain was China’s top supplier last year, making up nearly 23 per cent of its total pork imports, followed by Brazil and the United States.
“We are worried,” Arnaud Rousseau, president of the FNSEA, France’s largest farmers’ union, told reporters when asked about possible Chinese action against pork imports from the EU.
“There are certain parts of the pig that are not eaten in Europe and that need to find markets, and China is an important market … We can quickly have problems if we don’t have trade with certain countries.”
China imported US$6 billion worth of pig, including offal, from around the world last year.