UK faces tough job to seal export deals post-brexit
Maintaining exports to the EU has been viewed as a key factor for agriculture in the post-brexit world – but yesterday experts warned that holding on to deals with countries outside the EU could also represent a major challenge.
Peter Hardwick, head of exports at the Agricultural and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB), said that securing the future of vital exports such as seed potatoes and malting barley was likely to be a complex and challenging task – but would be crucial for the industry.
“Taking the seed potato sector as an example, the industry sees some real challenges,” he said. “We need to be realistic – 75 per cent of our seed potato exports now go outside the EU and we need to ensure there’s continuity in those markets.”
He said that as the UK was listed separately in the agreement it might, at first, appear that it would be a straightforward job to disentangle the UK form the wider agreement and then enter a bilateral deal with non-eu countries. However Hardwick
0 Malting barley exports will be subject to negotiations revealed that it only took “a bit of digging” into the detail of these agreements to discover that that the underlying commitment which had actually been signed up to was one which was governed by European treaties which the UK was set to leave.
“For example, within the agreement with Egypt, there’s a specific commitment that the EU supplies seed potatoes tariff and quota free, but there is a reciprocal agreement that we take 250,000 tariff-free tonnes of ware potatoes from Egypt.
“It’s quite clear the UK will not want to take that full quota, so we will have to enter into some form of negotiation.”
Hardwick added that even the UK’S bilateral agreements – such as that for exporting malting barley to China – would be affected by Brexit:
However the organisation’s knowledge exchange manager, Phil Dolbear, said that although farmers should be aware of these problems, they should concentrate on issues which they could control themselves.
“Although farmers are acutely aware of the markets at a global level, they are becoming more aware of what they can control at an on-farm level,” said Dolebear who said a greater degree of trust and cooperation was developing between producers.