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LONDON: Despite the free trade agreement signed by London and Brussels, food and medicine providers fear that rapidly introduced changes will disrupt supplies and increase costs, undermining the government’s claims for a post-Brexit dividend.
While Boris Johnson had promised a “ready-to-bake” deal a year ago, the British prime minister finally “gave us four business days”, the Food and Drink Federation complained before Britain left the single market for EU by the end of 2020.
Minette Batters, president of the National Farmers Union, said members “anticipate that there will still be disruptions in trade at the border,” despite the agreement signed on Wednesday (December 30).
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As many companies rushed to order more stock or fulfill orders delayed by coronavirus lockdowns, England’s Channel ports, particularly Dover, were already overwhelmed before the deal was announced.
The situation worsened when several European countries closed their borders with Great Britain for two days before Christmas, seeking to slow the spread of a new, more contagious variant of COVID-19.
Thousands of trucks heading to the ports got stuck in huge traffic jams and it took several days and the help of the military to unravel the situation.
Ian Wright, executive director of the Food and Beverage Federation, said that “last week’s chaos in Dover and the last-gasp nature of this deal means there will be a significant supply disruption and some prices will go up.”
While the London-EU compromise deal removed the threat of quotas and tariffs, all the new checks and forms to fill out will take time and increase costs for food and drug companies, trade associations complain.
Around 30 per cent of the food consumed in the UK comes from the EU. Britain imports almost half of its fresh vegetables and most of its fruit.
But John Allan, president of the market-leading supermarket giant Tesco, tried to reassure consumers, telling the BBC that the new administrative costs “would hardly be felt in terms of the prices consumers pay.”
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HEALTH RISKS
But small food companies don’t enjoy the weight of Tesco. And the changes also affect the import and export of medicines amid the pandemic.
The deal does not eliminate difficulties over “the flow of vital supplies into the UK,” Mark Dayan of the Nuffield Trust, an independent health think-tank, said in a statement.
He praised the deal for agreeing to “mutual recognition of inspections for drug factories and some cooperation at customs”, but warned that “the red tape required for vital products to enter and leave the UK will multiply.”
This will make it more difficult and expensive “to bring supplies to the NHS (National Health Service) or sell them competitively in Europe,” he warned.
It was also unclear whether the agreement provided for mutual recognition of standards for ventilators and face masks essential to combat COVID-19, he said.
In the case of medicines with a short shelf life, the UK health department “has asked companies to ensure that they can ship these medicines from the EU in the event of a supply interruption,” according to the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. .
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He also said the government has secured additional storage space and more ships, including priority for the loading of drugs on ferries from certain ports.
However, Dayan, writing in the British Medical Journal, said that given the need for “a major logistical and legal change overnight” and the fact that Britain has suffered from generic drug shortages in recent years, “It would take a lot of courage to promise that there will be no shortages.”
“There will be changes,” Johnson admitted in an interview with the BBC on Wednesday, while insisting that Brexit would lead to a trade boom through “free trade agreements with other countries around the world.”
