Big costs for small businesses

SMALLER companies may face disproportionate costs because if they export small batches, every one of these will need a veterinary health certificate.

The costs vary, said Ivan Bartolo, but it’s going to be bad, for example, for crab and lobster fishermen who tend to send a few boxes at a time to Europe.

A proposed solution is to create a hub so seafood firms can pool their batches and have a single catch certificate that covers them all.

Bartolo said he had only heard about this being applied to catches., rather than farmed shellfish.

Farmed bivalve molluscs had a separate problem, though, but more in England, where a lot of the mussels that go abroad are farmed in B waters.

These are then exported to Holland, and a few other places, for further depuration to get fit for human consumption level.

‘Europe doesn’t allow the importation of shellfish unless it is ready for human consumption so the UK, if we do leave with a no deal, would only be able to export mussels if they’re from category A waters, with very stringent microbiological requirements,’ said Bartolo.

‘A lot of the mussels in Scotland are farmed in A waters so that’s fine. In England, practically all of them are in B waters.

‘There’s a well-established trade where the UK sends theses mussels for further depuration in Europe and we recognise we have a hitch with this. It would be impossible for this sort of trade to carry on.

‘Defra has been working very hard to find a way through this and they’re pretty confident they’ve found a way of exporting these mussels by exporting them as aquaculture animals for further growing on, not as food.

‘It’s a way around it and Defra are quite confident it should work – though it’s not really been tested yet.’