Like an ageing popstar returning to the charts after years in the wilderness, Brexit is enjoying a revival. Sir Keir Starmer is the impresario responsible for getting the band together after the prime minister hosted a hotly anticipated UK-EU summit in London this week. The result is the basis for a new agreement that will see barriers to trade reduced and agri-food standards harmonised – or “dynamically aligned” in trade terminology.
Setting aside the politics for a moment, it’s worth stating how significant a moment this is for the entire UK food industry. In spite of the UK’s messy political divorce from the bloc, the EU has remained (and will remain regardless of whatever trade deals are struck in future) by far the UK’s largest trading partner in food and drink. Recently, however, that trade has come at a considerably higher cost than before. The EU moved quickly to impose extra checks and costs on UK businesses following Brexit resulting in food and drink exports dropping by a third since 2019. The UK took longer to create its own regime but since the border trade operating model was implemented in April last year businesses have reported considerable friction in bringing food across the channel, often resulting in unnecessary wastage or a reduction in shelf life. Importers estimate the cumulative cost of new paperwork, charges and physical checks on medium and high-risk goods like meat and dairy products has run into hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. For some small EU suppliers of products like speciality meats and cheeses, the costs of exporting to the UK no longer stack up, which in turn impacts the choice UK restaurants, delis and other food businesses can offer their customers.
It’s no surprise therefore that the food industry has been largely united in welcoming the agreement to work towards a common sanitary and phytosanitary area that will result in the vast majority of movements of animals, animal products, plants, and plant products between the UK and the EU being undertaken without the certificates or controls that are currently required. “A high-quality agreement will have clear benefits for consumers and businesses,” said the Food and Drink Federation. “The new agreement with the EU to remove trade barriers is positive news for hospitality businesses and will help to further increase access to high-quality, affordable food and drink for business and consumers alike,” said UKHospitality. Supermarket bosses, for their part, have promised food prices will fall once the agreement comes into effect.
Not everyone is fully on-board with the terms of the deal. The fishing sector has quite reasonably suggested it has been used as a pawn in negotiations after the government agreed to grant EU boats fishing access in British waters for a further 12 years. Yet the fundamentals of the fishing trade, whereby the UK exports much of what it catches to Europe where people eat more fish and a greater diversity of species, means some compromise over access is inevitable.
The government’s noisiest political opponents meanwhile, free from the intellectual burden of navigating tricky geopolitics, have accused it of betrayal and surrendering sovereignty to Brussels. The notion that the UK is once again a “rule taker” has gained currency on the media circuit, yet this ignores the fact that all countries seeking trade agreements are in some way rule takers (US farmers take the UK’s rules banning hormone-treated beef for instance) and that the UK helped set many of the EU’s rules as an influential member over several decades (and has largely kept them since Brexit). A more valid critique is the risk that dynamic alignment of rules in areas like food and agriculture stifles future innovation. The UK has already shown itself prepared to go further and faster than the notoriously cautious EU in embracing innovations like cell-cultivated meat and gene editing. It remains to be seen what impact the new agreement has in these and other areas.
Elsewhere in Footprint News this week:
- Pork supplier Cranswick has launched an independent review into welfare standards after revelations of abuse at one of its pig farms. More.
- Social media ‘super-spreaders’ are fuelling dangerous myths about nutrition, according to new research. More.
- The future of the global farmed salmon industry is at risk from an over-reliance on wild fish stocks for feed. More.
