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Buyers in Northern Ireland have canceled orders for nearly 100,000 trees due to a post-Brexit ban on plants moving from Britain, The Guardian may reveal.
Business leaders say it’s a major setback for tree-planting programs in Belfast and elsewhere in the region.
The Woodland Trust in Northern Ireland has just canceled an order for 22,000 trees, which were intended for schools and communities as part of a Northern Ireland green project.
“It’s a disaster. They’re just stopping mainland UK exports to Northern Ireland. We can’t get trees out of any of the nurseries you would normally deal with there,” said Gregor Fulton, estate and extension manager at the trust.
Scotland-based Alba Trees, one of Britain’s biggest suppliers, selling around 250,000 trees a year to Northern Ireland, says it has also been hit.
“At one stroke, Brexit has taken a large part of our business,” said Craig Turner, CEO. “We rejected an order for 70,000 oaks a couple of weeks ago because we can’t ship them.”
And Belfast City Council, which has an ambitious tree planting program involving 1 million plants, confirmed that it had a delivery of “300 large sample trees” from a supplier in England “delayed due to new rules on the movement of plants “of Great Britain.
The horticulture division that Brexit has created between Britain and Northern Ireland is expected to be raised at the meeting between local business leaders and European Commission Vice President Maroš Šefčovič on Thursday. The problem is one of many problems caused by Brexit, including a ban on exporting live seafood to the EU.
“We think they would be initial problems that would be solved quickly. It really seems ridiculous, ”Fulton said. “The irony is that now I can get a tree more easily from Latvia than from Britain, which totally undermines all the work on biosecurity,” he added, referring to the risk of importing pests and diseases.
The problem stems from three new rules that apply to Northern Ireland, which is observing EU customs and regulatory rules on plants and animals as part of the Northern Ireland protocol.
Two weeks ago a ban on the transfer of British soil to Northern Ireland emerged, and garden centers protested a blockage of supplies from British nurseries. Fulton said he had been told that washing all the dirt from the roots might be the solution.
“That is not practical. We received an order last year for 56,000 trees in one go. You cannot wash 56,000 tree roots. It would be too high a cost and the nurseries just aren’t going to do that, ”he said.
If bare root trees were available in sufficient quantities, buyers would face Brexit formalities involving health certification and customs for the plants.
An additional barrier comes from the EU’s list of prohibited or restricted species for import from third countries, which now includes the UK.
The list is designed to protect Europe from diseases and pests, but includes native trees such as oaks, alders and birches, important for native mixed forests.
Mike Harvey, director of Maelor Forest Nurseries in Wales, which sells around 32 million trees a year, said he had also had to stop selling to Northern Ireland, with a recent order for 1,000 oak trees about to be canceled.
But what infuriates Harvey is not so much the ban on the movement of trees to Northern Ireland, but the continued importation of trees from Ireland for afforestation projects.
He said Brexit gave the UK a chance to close the border to EU trees and give the country a chance to fight to stop the “drift of the disease from southeast Europe to the northwest.”
Diseases, which some attribute to climate change, include ash dieback and Xylella disease, which has reached the UK via olive trees and can affect several broadleaf tree species.
“It is typical for the EU to put these restrictions in place and rigorously enforce them in Northern Ireland, but we leave the borders open to trees coming from the EU, including Ireland and the Netherlands,” said Harvey.
“If we want to control disease and give ourselves a chance, it is actually good to stop the transport of trees between our islands.”
The obstructions have emerged just as Northern Ireland’s Environment Minister Gordon Lyons launches a campaign to remind farmers that they only have a few weeks left to apply for funds to plant native forests, to help deliver on the promise of plant 18 million trees by 2030.
