SYDNEY -- The cheering has died. Hardheaded businessmen are taking a second look. Suddenly the newly agreed Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement is looking distinctly one-sided -- and not in Australia's favor.

A national letdown is palpable. Everyone here has been so keyed up in anticipation of Australia joining the world rush to bilateral trade pacts, especially with the world's biggest economy, that the final signing was greeted with widespread acclaim. The deadline had been reached when U.S. President George W. Bush had to stop applauding his little mate, Australian Prime Minister John Howard, and start concentrating on being re-elected next November.

But as Howard learned, U.S. politicians have no foreign buddies in an election year. Not when America's notorious Sugar Mafia controls so many seats in Congress. So sugar, a commodity vital to northeastern Australia's economic health, is missing from the deal.

How one-sided can you get, Australian beef producers complain. A neat rise in beef exports can be shipped to Australia's main export market -- so long as you wait 18 years for U.S. ranchers to adjust to foreign competition.

Well, Washington retorts, we are now willing to let you sell us avocados. Nice one, reply the few Australian growers of these fruit, except that the export time of year you allow is our off-season.

Picking holes in international agreements is a favorite sport, and disappointed Australian exporters are making the most of it. Just how angry the bickering can get will depend on pact details that are still leaking out. What is already clear, however, is that this deal is the best yet achieved with Australia's chief market and investment source.

To hear the shrill cries of farmers, one might think they are the be-all of Australia's export earnings. Tokyo knows that lament by heart. How else would the Liberal Democratic Party hang on to power without the moans of impending disaster from Japan's inefficient farmers? Likewise, Washington regularly bows to the inordinate demands of its rural rump.

In the real world of business earnings, however, communications, financial services and intellectual property are setting the pace of global trade. And here Australia has gained access to the world's most important market at levels calculated to strengthen its industries.

American exporters of services and intellectual property lobbied hard in Washington talks. They demanded fewer restrictions on U.S. investors, lower local content rules for TV and other media, changes to Australian patent and copyright laws, and a big say in Australia's unique pharmaceutical-benefits scheme. Back from Washington, Canberra negotiators are refusing to explain how far they buckled on these key issues.

The pharmaceuticals-subsidy scheme is the one most sensitive to a voter backlash here. If Canberra has given in to American drug companies' demands, resulting in higher pharmaceutical costs here, the outcry will be severe. Critics in the opposition-led Senate have already promised to derail the whole deal.

A preferential trade deal, not an FTA, is how most commentators here see it. "Horse trading between protectionists on both sides of the Pacific" is respected economist Ross Gittins' tart comment.

Exuberant Howard claims our $12 billion annual trade deficit with the U.S. will fall. American manufacturers are being told they will sell us $2.6 billion more a year in goods. Both sides are being told to be happy.

Ross Garnaut, an economics professor at Canberra's Australian National University, warns that our exports' troubles have now worsened. Our costs are rising faster than those of trading partners, he says. This year will see a fourth year of declining exports.

Unhappily for struggling exporters, the Australian dollar has zoomed too high too fast, hitting a 15-year peak against the rest of the world. Never before has Canberra needed freer world trade.

Economic reform begun in former Prime Minister Paul Keating's regime a decade ago has helped industries penetrate export markets, but reform momentum has flagged. Noisy lobby groups, rising taxes and public spending have sapped export capacity. Yet new opportunities are tantalizingly close.

Wolfgang Kasper, senior fellow at Sydney's Center for Independent Studies, notes that Australia offers a culturally and legally attractive base for American firms wanting to build a presence in East Asia: "We are now part of an emerging U.S.-centered network of bilateral trade and investment agreements. This will allow, for example, U.S.-owned car assemblers in Thailand to import high-tech Australian components and integrate them with U.S. knowhow.

"I look forward to my next Honda made in the U.S. coming to Australia a few thousand dollars cheaper. Maybe we will now be able to buy books and records at U.S. retail prices. Many of our products will be able to conquer huge new markets over there."

No sooner had U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick signed off his deal with Australian Trade Minister Mark Vaile then he hopped on a jet to reinvigorate the current round of multilateral trade negotiations in Doha, Qatar. These talks are notably aimed at reducing the protection provided to farmers in the U.S., Europe, Japan and South Korea.

Australia is in the odd position of leading developing countries in their vested interest of breaking down farm trade barriers while at the same time supporting the World Trade Organization's long-running battle to liberalize trade between developed countries in manufactured goods. As head of the Cairns Goup of agricultural exporting countries, Australia was hurt by the breakdown of WTO talks in Cancun, Mexico, last September. Hence its interest in the current Doha round.

But as critic Gittins complains: "Our capitulation to the Americans' insistence on totally excluding sugar from the Australia-U.S. deal has damaged our credibility as leader of the Cairns Group and weakened the bargaining position of developing country agricultural exporters.

The Financial Review, a respected daily, takes a pragmatic view of the bilateral deal. "Australia's manufacturers will have to get more efficient or get out," the Review editorializes. "This explains the unions' hysterical response. They know their armchair ride at the expense of consumers is finished. Businesses will need to back themselves and ignore those, including the neoprotectionists in the post-Keating Labor Party, who would sell them short."

All the post-deal huffing and puffing has only just begun, of course. Political backbiting will only worsen as the Labor Party uses the deal during this year's election to blame the Howard government for all economic ills.