Australia seems unhappy with the carefully negotiated trade deal cut with the United States years ago, and the country’s been pressing to make things a bit more one-sided—to the detriment of U.S. farmers.

At the 27th International Sweetener Symposium in Vail, Colorado, Elizabeth Ward, the Australian Embassy’s trade counselor, said her nation wants to use another upcoming trade agreement, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), to seize a bigger chunk of the U.S. sugar market.

The TPP includes seven countries of the Asia Pacific region, including Australia, Singapore, Chile, New Zealand, Brunei, Peru and Vietnam.

Ward said this because a 2005 Free Trade Agreement between the United States and Australia specifically excluded additional sugar access above the amount already provided under a World Trade Organization agreement.

Australia is facing stiff opposition.

Don Phillips is a trade adviser to the American Sugar Alliance. He said reopening the deal with Australia might cost sugar-related jobs, and could cost taxpayers more to deal with sugar surpluses.

“Several trade deals are stalled in Congress right now,” Phillips said, “and the thought of reopening one that Congress already approved seems very unwise.”

He’s not the only one that finds reopening the deal unwise.

In a May 11th letter, 20 different farm organizations – from the Farm Bureau to the Milk Producers to the Rice Federation – asked the Obama administration not to reopen this agreement or other ones. The letter stated:

“The U.S. should not acquiesce to the insistence of some TPP participants that the U.S. pursue an alternate approach that would do more to advance their market access interests than it would our own.”

Nearly 30 farm groups signed a follow-up letter to the U.S. Trade Representative’s office in August asking that carefully balanced trade deals not be reopened as Australia has asked.

Beyond this, developing countries are pressuring the United States to deny Australia’s request, because they, too, would lose U.S. sugar market share in the deal.

A cascade of sugar imports from Australia or other TPP countries could hurt poor countries like Guyana, Zimbabwe, Belize, and Barbados, explained Paul Ryberg, president of the International Sugar Trade Coalition, which represents the sugar industries of nearly 20 developing nations and has been a big supporter of U.S. sugar policy.

“Australia is a rich, developed nation, and it would be taking away potential market share from poor, developing countries while driving down the fair price on which these nations depend,” he said.

As they say in farming circles: Australia has a long row to hoe.