Affordability, variety and convenience of food is often seen as a success of modern markets. And as a trade economist, I agree up to a point. Liberalised trade has lowered prices, expanded choice, and had some success in insulating consumers from supply shocks. But it has also done something we are far less willing to acknowledge: it has made the least healthy foods the easiest to trade.
Trade policy has never been about a single objective. It has always involved managing trade-offs between growth, affordability, resilience, public health, environmental sustainability, and social welfare. So, when nearly 57% of daily energy intake in the UK now comes from ultra-processed foods, it becomes difficult to argue that expanding market access alone has delivered a win for all.
Biased trade
The problem with ultra-processed food – with its high levels of saturated fat, salt and sugars – is not only what is in it, but how easily it moves across borders. Products with longer shelf life can move cheaply and predictably around the world. Fresh and minimally processed foods lack the same level of flexibility. This is not a failure of markets but the result of incentives we have built to encourage trade in that particular category of products.
The UK’s post-Brexit tariff regime offers a clear example of this bias. Early tariff relief on products such as sweetened or canned fruits – which are widely used in snacks, desserts, and breakfast foods – has helped keep prices down. That has been presented as a consumer win, but it reveals supply chains built around sugar-dense, heavily processed ingredients.
We have chosen to make these ingredients cheaper to trade while leaving their health consequences unpriced. If liberalised trade is to deliver net social gains, this should concern us. A trade system that consistently shifts dietary risk on to consumers and future health systems while delivering short-term price reductions is poorly designed.
That misalignment is reinforced by how we classify traded food. A jar of jam and a fruit purée can fall under the same trade code, despite radically different nutritional profiles. This may be administratively convenient, but it is no longer defensible.
When trade data cannot distinguish between products that contribute to diet-related ill health and those that do not, it is failing to do its job.
Managing trade tensions
What is striking is how often these issues are treated as arguments against liberalisation. They are not. Trade has the capacity to promote better health outcomes as easily as it has scaled poor ones. But that requires abandoning the idea that openness can be judged on market access and efficiency alone.
Transparency in labelling, clearer recognition of foods associated with diet-related harm, and better trade data are not constraints on markets. They are prerequisites for markets that function honestly.
Trade has always shaped societies as much as it has shaped economies. Managing tensions between the objectives and consequences of trade is precisely what modern trade policy demands, and why interdisciplinary approaches that link trade, sustainability, and health are becoming increasingly central to how the subject is taught and studied in academic research centres.
Acknowledging this truth does not weaken the case for liberalised trade. It strengthens it by insisting that openness must also be judged by the outcomes it produces.
Sahana Suraj is a research fellow in international trade at the University of Sussex and UK Trade Policy Observatory economist
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