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This is Andrew Peach with World Business Report, a new agreement between Britain and the European Union with claims it'll help exporters make food cheaper and boost economic growth.
There's positive reaction from some.
It will allow me to have the sense and guarantee to look at further growth because I'll be confident that the supply of very committed young people that want to work in the travel industry will be available to me.
But Rouse about fishing rights… We lost 26 % of our macro quota in transfer to the UK.
Ireland paid the highest price as part of Brexit.
Also on the way, the world of advanced microchips in Phoenix Arizona.
This wafer contains about 10 to 14 trillion transistors.
If you can shrink and get into this wafer, it will be like streets and skyscrapers.
First, Britain and the European Union have signed what the UK government has described as a landmark deal that takes in trade, security, fishing and travel arrangements.
The EU said the deal was a new chapter in relations and entente cordiale maybe.
Here's the UK Prime Minister Sakeer Starmer speaking at the first UK EU summit since Brexit.
Ladies and gentlemen, Britain is back on the world stage.
We have working with our partners, doing deals that will grow our economy and putting more money in the pockets of working people.
The EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen said she believed this was a start of a better relationship.
We're turning a page.
We're opening a new chapter in our unique relationship.
This is the story of historical and natural partners standing side by side on the global stage.
Here's our UK correspondent Rob Watson.
So what they do is to make it easier in terms of trade in food and agriculture and travel for ordinary people.
So, if you like, it's softening a Brexit at the edges and essentially in return for that what is Britain giving up?
Well, it's giving up some of its autonomy to make its own rules and regulations on food and agriculture safety and it's also ensuring that European fishermen get continued access to British waters.
Still to work on are things like youth mobility schemes, so freedom of movement for people between 18 and 30 to go to Europe or Europeans to come to the UK.
Other things that they'll be working on are cooperation on sharing energy links, working on carbon trading emissions.
So there's a basket of things where they said, right, we couldn't quite get there yet.
More details to be done, but we're working on that.
And then, of course, the third thing is that they have agreed a security and defence pact.
So, as Rob was saying, key areas we'll see changes, including food and fishing.
Since Brexit exporting and importing cheese has been more complicated.
Monday's agreements, or both sides, agree to remove many of the cheques that were causing friction, so cheese and sausage makers will once again be able to sell into and out of the EU without health certification, something that killed off some small businesses.
I've been talking to Mary Quick, who is a cheesemaker from Dorset in the south of England.
Her sales to Europe have plummeted since Brexit.
They've plummeted because of the checks that have been put in place, the export health certificates, the amount of bureaucracy on both sides.
In the early days, one of our larger customers got stung with a penalty because they hadn't filled in the paperwork properly.
It doesn't take much for people to go, you know, sod that for a game of soldiers.
So the fact that most of the cheques have been dropped could well boost business.
I guess it'll take a little while, because customers don't come back overnight, or new customers aren't found overnight.
But even so? Yes, certainly.
And of course, as far as I understand it, it's a commitment to negotiate and the details aren't all thrashed out.
And of course it'll take time.
Sales are not an overnight thing.
Our customers in Europe will have found other ways of supplying their customers with something or other that satisfies what they want.
But we hope that, with work and diligence, and hopefully with a bit of support from the UK government to help with cheese exports, which they did do last year, and that was great, that we could really relaunch our export sales into the EU.
The official estimates suggest the cost of Brexit to UK GDP is about 4%.
Could you give me any sense at all of what the numbers are for your business and what it's cost you in the last few years?
Crikey, well it's difficult to say isn't it because it's what might have happened.
I would think probably about Crikey.
I mean five percent of our business and that would be mostly made up of lost sales, and also extra time that we spent in trying to, you know, do all the paperwork and not managing it.
There still is, even now, cheese being stopped at the border.
I mean, for instance, all of the British cheese going into Portugal for the World Cheese Awards got stopped and nobody knows which. As far as everybody knew and can tell the paperwork was fine but it was completely random.
Same thing, Irish cheese coming into the UK for the British Cheese Awards just got stopped.
No idea why, you know, it's like random customs glitches.
And there's just a whole bundle of nonsense of admin nightmares that Brexit has given us, so you know anything we can do to oil those wheels will be more business.
Obviously people in the UK are likely to know about this because it's quite big news in the UK.
I wonder how big a story it is in the sort of European countries where you're trying to re -establish your markets though and if people don't automatically have this info from the news media how are you gonna tell Mary Quick Well, I guess we'll be talking more to specialists, in other words, to, you know, people who buy our cheese.
And in the main, those people, their response to Brexit was just to get terribly angry.
You know, why have you allowed this to happen?
And it often felt like it was quite personal.
I didn't blooming vote that way.
But when I went and showed up with people in Europe, they were just, you know, beside themselves.
Mary Quick, who is a cheesemaker in southern England.
Now, fishing is another area where agreement has been reached between London and Brussels.
Fishing rights have always been a controversial aspect of all of this.
They've long dogged the relationship between the UK and the EU.
And guess what? Not everyone is happy with the outcome today.
Aid O 'Donnell is from the Irish Fish Producers' Organisation.
Well, generally there's a high degree of disappointment with some of our members in relation to the deal.
It's essentially a rollover of the previous deal of 2020.
It doesn't give us a level playing field within Europe.
And effectively Ireland, as the main contributor of value in terms of quota transfer to the UK remains without an unbalanced situation.
If it's basically the status quo, what problems does that cause?
Well, essentially the status quo as Dan's since 2020 is a key challenge to the resilience, the competitiveness, the scale and the scope of our industry.
For example, we are based near Kilibigs, we lost 26 % of our mackerel quota in transfer to the UK.
Now we work very closely with the UK, we are close neighbours, we work together.
But Ireland paid the highest price in relation to the quota transfer from Europe to the UK as part of Brexit.
And do you feel that fishing has been sacrificed for other things?
Because I know that's the sentiment among some people in UK fishing?
Yeah, there is a strong feeling that fishing has been sacrificed once again.
There's also a strong feeling that other member states resisted this round of giving up long -standing rights and essentially their governments backed them.
So we have a situation where our coastal communities are being affected, our economies are being affected, our economic vitality's been lost, and our national respect as players in the seafood sector is being diminished.
Some people, when we talk about this, always say the fish can presumably swim from one place to another, from one jurisdiction to another.
So how can anyone determine who owns them?
Well, in actual fact, some of these stocks are migratory.
But the stock levels and the quotas taken from those stocks are covered by scientific advice.
So when we transfer quota to the UK, we're transferring our share of that quota based on scientific advice.
And you'll know that fishermen who operate in the UK feel the same thing.
They feel that they're fishing quotas, their fish effectively are being given away to the European Union?
We can understand that in certain instances, for us, two of our key fisheries, we gave away 26 % of the mackerel quota in 2020 overnight.
In Dublin Bay prawns or langoustines as they're better known.
We transferred 15 % of those quotas to the UK as part of a Brexit deal.
An actual fact and some of these quotas have not been fished by the UK vessels themselves.
When you got the fishing industry on both sides of the negotiation putting their hands up and saying it's not a good deal for us doesn't that effectively balance itself out and say well if both sides are equally unhappy then maybe they've got as pharaoh deal as they could possibly have got well, that's depends on the point of view essentially.
There are other factors that have come into play in this there's geopolitical considerations.
There's considerations about certain member States having a strong voice at the table particularly the French have been very vocal recently and they would appear to have managed to resist giving up their outstanding rights in quotas in the review of the TAC this year.
Do you think the Irish Government haven't tried hard enough or just that nobody's listening?
Well, unfortunately or fortunately for us, our competent authority in the negotiation is the EU Commission, so we rely on them to defend our position and in actual fact, what we have now is a situation where the issue of the imbalance or the disproportionate contribution of Irish quotas to the TCA, need to be addressed internally within the EU itself.
Now what are you telling me is going to happen as a result of this to the fishing communities and businesses that depend on this as a source of income?
Well essentially we have lost significantly, we've lost scale, we've lost as I've said previously, competitiveness, as a result we've lost resilience.
Our communities are challenged by the fact that we've had to downscale, we've had significant decommissioning of our white fish fleets particularly, and the profitability of the sector both offshore in terms of catching and onshore in terms of processing is much reduced.
That's Eido Donald from the Irish Fish Producers Organisation.
The UK and the EU have agreed to work towards a youth experience scheme as part of all this.
That would allow young people from the European union to live and work in the UK and vice versa.
Before Brexit that there was free movement of labour and for many young people the loss of that is a frustration.
For some businesses it's meant staff shortages.
Charles Owen is Managing Director of the European Pub Company which runs bars in the French Alps, mostly catering for British tourists.
He's crossing his fingers the Youth Experience scheme becomes a reality.
I'm really excited about it and I think it's wonderfully named because it's going to give the opportunity that I was lucky enough to have almost 25 years ago, to be able to work over in Europe, and it was that experience of working in France in a holiday resort that has led me to a journey which has ended up of me starting a business.
So I'm really excited that the experience I got is potentially going to be available to thousands of young people from all over the UK to start careers in the holiday industry.
Now, obviously, the experience for people on both sides of this is really valuable.
But from a business point of view, what difference will that then make to you?
It means that you'll be able to employ people from the UK who are spending some time in France?
Yes. At the moment, when I employ out my 100 staff every year, because we tend to reapply re -employ from the majority of them because they tend to work just for the winter season.
About 50 % will be for the UK and currently with the close working we've been doing with the French government, we've been able to get the route to get UK people to work in France but it involves applying for work permits and for work visas.
It's costly. It's timely.
With the youth experience scheme, the idea is that when this is finally agreed, then we will just be able to employ them immediately and that will make it much easier.
It will allow me to have the sense and guarantee to look at further growth because I'll be confident that the supply of very committed young people that want to work in the travel industry that speak English will be available to me.
Now there will be people thinking why can't you employ people who are in France, why don't you employ young French people to these jobs?
Well, we've tried. And And actually, after the Brexit referendum, I set up an organisation called ESPIT, Seasonal Businesses and Travel.
There's about 100 companies involved, companies like Ski World, like Inghams, Ski Weekends, the Neilsons, that operate holidays over in France.
And we were concerned that we weren't going to be able to employ French people.
So, I actually posted 7 ,000 job adverts on the French unemployment websites and guaranteed to employ any French person that applied and successfully met the criteria.
We got three applications in 2019, two of which were spam and the third one didn't speak English.
So it was based on that that we were fairly sure that there weren't the French people that actually wanted to do these jobs in the holiday resorts and this can be in summer resorts or in winter resorts.
Is what is being described now as good from the point of view of your business as the UK being in the European Union?
No, it's not. When we were in the European Union, it was any British person that wanted to go work anywhere over in Europe could do an interview with them on the Monday.
And if they pass the interview, we could put them on a train or a plane to get out to the resort by Wednesday and there were no costs, no visas involved with that.
So that meant it was incredibly flexible and as a result the UK outbound travel industry was significantly larger than it is today.
So that this isn't the same as we had before but it goes a long way to actually mean that there are going to be many countries in Europe that the UK outbound travel industry will be able to operate in which we literally haven't been able to operate in for the last five years.
And from Charles Owen to Peter Jankowskis, who's live with us from Chicago.
Peter, the vice president of research and analysis at Arbor Financial Services.
Peter, give me your perspective on this whole business of relations between the EU and the UK.
Does anyone in the States care?
Well you know I I think it wasn't big news today but it's certainly something that we've been looking at given the moves that the Trump administration is making in trade generally.
My hunch is that some of those actions have basically caused the UK and and the EU to to come to an agreement more quickly than they might have otherwise.
That's interesting so the hand of Donald Trump is everywhere.
I suppose that there has been the suggestion that Donald Trump likes the UK, he's less keen on the European Union and that might have been to the UK's advantage in dealing with him.
Have they lost a bit of that now?
I'm not so sure that they have. I think he still is anxious to make a deal with the UK, but certainly the UK is better off having made a deal with the EU as it's a very close trading partner just across the channel.
We'll have a look at some of the other stories that have been moving the markets in a second.
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And this is World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
I'm Andrew Peach. Now, this is a company helping to shape the future of the global economy for shore, TSMC, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which makes the advanced microchips you'll find at the heart of well pretty much every modern device we use from smartphones to cars.
It's also at the centre of the chip rivalry raging across the world, one of the subplots of President Trump's trade war.
TSMC is a very secretive company but as it expands its operations in the It invited the BBC to go and see its facility in Phoenix, Arizona.
Our economics editor Faisal Islam went to have a look.
In the baking heat in the desert of Arizona, just outside Phoenix, an extraordinary building has just been built.
And the hum you can hear is of further construction beginning to happen.
and it is the most important company you've never heard of, TSMC, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company which makes 90 % of the world's advanced semiconductors and it's a really secretive place.
It's secretive because it's amongst the most important intellectual property in the world.
It's super lockdown and they've led us in, to have a look around at a facility that could change the world economy and change the world.
Welcome to TSMZ Arizona.
Thank you. Microchips are at the heart of virtually every device we use, from cars to iPhones to hospital scanners.
They power the modern economy and will form the backbone of our AI future, where fierce rivalries are emerging between America and China.
One reason why President Trump has become a little obsessed with this company and bringing its manufacturing process to the US.
From TSMC, which is the biggest there is at a level that you can't even calculate, frankly.
We gradually lost the chip business and now it's almost exclusively in Taiwan.
They stole it from us.
Great company, most powerful in the world, biggest chip company in the world.
They're spending 200 billion dollars in Arizona.
I'm here in what they call the gowning building and the other side of a barrier is the skybridge and where the workers get dressed up in protective clothing that is meant to essentially protect the cleanest environment on earth in order to protect the production of these extraordinary microscopic transistors that create the microchips underpinning everything we do.
So this is a 4nm wafer.
I'm Constantinos Niños.
I'm here at Fab 21 as department manager for dry air.
Konstantinios is showing me what's known as a wafer, a slice of silicon the size of a dinner plate, on which transistors or tiny circuits controlling the flow of an electric current sit by the billion.
They're smaller than red blood cells, not much bigger than atoms, can't be seen by the human eye and are etched into the wafer using ultraviolet light, a process known as lithography.
Yes, this is the most advanced wafer in the U .S. right now.
This wafer contains about 10 to 14 trillion transistors.
If you can shrink and get into this wafer it will be like streets and skyscrapers.
Understandably they're hugely protective, not just of the cleanliness of the environment, but also of the secrets.
There's a really big important customers, famous customers, Apple, Nvidia and the likes who tell this company their designs for their future products in order to make all the advances that consumers buy in the bucket load.
And so this makes this one the most sensitive areas.
They won't even understandably show us the other side.
So just imagine a particle, or a dust particle falling into this.
Yes. The transistor is not going to work.
so it's maybe cleaner than operating rooms, anything else you can imagine on earth.
This is the cleanest place on earth.
The boss here is overseeing a $165bn investment that has transferred carbon copies of three of the company's Taiwanese factories with more to come.
Rose Castanares, TSMC, Arizona President.
I certainly believe it is one of the most important factories in the world.
So I'm here in the main extra construction area of this facility.
They've built one so -called fab already, two is in yellow, about to be completed in the next couple of years, and then there's another four potentially signed off.
Now, President Trump has wasted very little time in claiming vindication for this, for his economic policies, claiming in particular that it wouldn't have happened without his tariff policies.
Now they're very diplomatic here at this company about that claim.
Much of this was already planned under the Biden administration.
And it is not at all clear that tariffs will help in this semiconductor supply chain, which stretches all over the world, whether it's the silicon wafers from Japan, the major machines required for the lithography from the Netherlands, all sorts of materials from all round the world, all that are facing tariffs.
Indeed, his tariffs will raise costs for key parts of the process.
The semiconductor supply chain is global.
There's really no single country at this moment that can do everything from chemicals, to wafer manufacturing, to packaging.
And so it's very difficult to unwind that whole thing very quickly.
TSMC, your trusted partner to power the AI era.
It's a battle for global tech and economic supremacy in which Taiwan's factory technology is a critical asset, much of which is now being moved to the Arizona desert.
Faisal Islam reporting, still with me.
Peter Jancaoskis from Arbour Financial Services joining us from Chicago.
What do you make of TSMC and their move into the US, setting more of that operation there?
Well it certainly is something that that's come about over a long period of time with the CHIP act that was passed under the Biden administration contributing but also I think if you go back to the first Trump administration and and some of the things that were put in place with regard to semiconductors and such there probably is some legitimacy of claim that that's a factor as well though certainly not the more recent activity given given that the factory was already in place when when all this happened so overall I think it's a good strategic move for both Taiwan semiconductor and the US to
have that manufacturing capability here in the U .S. now story that's been developing while we've been on the air General Motors has said it's going to stop exporting to China.
Now, Donald Trump has spent the past few months complaining about the fact that US cars don't sell terribly well in China, so they may not be stopping very much. I don't know, but what's behind all this?
Well, I think they could simply be trying to shore up their income statement.
I believe that they have been generating losses over in that unit.
So I think it's a straightforward business move.
I don't think it's necessarily related to the tariff and and trade wars that have been going on it's just that they haven't managed to establish a foothold there.
Okay and would that do you think have any prospect of contagion in the wider US auto industry or is it a specific GM thing?
Well I think you could see something similar from some of the majors I think I would be more surprised if you saw Tesla, for example, pull out, given that there is a strong mandate for electrical vehicles there and they have produced a sizeable number of electric vehicles there.
So it's something that you might see with some of the other kind of legacy manufacturers, but I think a closer relationship to tariffs would come if we saw movement from Tesla.
quick word about Walmart and its profits because there's a lot of focus on food prices in the US at the moment.
Indeed they are passing on some of their increased cost due to tariffs.
President Trump has certainly been you know using the bully pulpit the bully pulpit of the presidency to try to get them not to do that but at the end of the day they have to do what's best for for Walmart and and Walmart shareholders.
It's interesting though, isn't it?
Because Trump is very into cultivating relationships with, at least, top business leaders.
Do they take any notice of him, though?
Well, from stories that we've seen, that a lot of these tariff policies are creating a great deal of discord among senior business leaders.
But many of them are afraid to express their opposition to it.
Peter, thank you very much indeed for being with us.
Always appreciate your company.
Peter Jankowskas is the Vice President of Research and Analysis at ARBA Financial Services.
And that's it from me, Andrew Peach, and the World Business Report team.
Thank you for being with us on the BBC.
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