The United Kingdom does not feed itself, relying heavily on the European Union for fresh fruit and vegetables. That dependency has changed little since Britain left the bloc in 2020, and could now mean more pain for consumers and small businesses.
Tuesday marks the beginning of the long-delayed introduction of post-Brexit physical inspections of plant and animal imports from the EU. The spot checks will apply initially to products such as meat, cheese and some fish, and eventually to a range of vegetables and fruit.
Hefty new charges on some imported food products will also come into effect, threatening to reduce consumer choice and push up prices not long after UK food inflation fell from double-digit rates. The measures coincide with dire warnings about the possibility of price rises for bread and beer because of the impact of unprecedented rainfall on British grain harvests.
The new regime for food imports is perhaps the starkest example of the painful border bureaucracy that UK and EU businesses must contend with in the wake of Brexit.
Before leaving the EU, Britain enjoyed unencumbered access to the vast array of food produced in neighboring countries: cheese from France, peaches from Spain, artichokes from Italy. A steady stream of EU agricultural workers, meanwhile, was a boon to British farmers.
In the post-Brexit world, Britain’s food supply is more vulnerable to external shocks, even as related labor shortages have at times forced local farmers to leave crops rotting because of a lack of workers to harvest them.
An employee arranges the display on a fresh fruit and vegetable stall in Watney market in London in March 2024. Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg/Getty Images
UK industry groups say the additional red tape could mean thousands of pounds in extra costs each month for a typical business, while hold-ups at the border will reduce the shelf-life of perishable products and increase food waste.
Eddie Price, the director of the Birmingham Wholesale Market, which houses around 50 businesses selling meat, vegetables, fish, and flowers, says traders are worried about higher costs and delays at the border.
“There are concerns that (the food) will probably get held up at the point of entry for a couple of days and potentially reduce the value of the product and make it less available,” he told CNN. “There is a real concern, particularly among the larger importers, that it could add several percentage points to their costs.”
The UK government insists the new controls are crucial to ensure biosecurity and that checks will be phased in “in a sensible and controlled way,” with the focus initially on the “highest-risk goods,” a category that includes live animals.
“It is important to remember the cost of our border checks is negligible compared to the impact of a major disease outbreak on our economy and farmers,” a government spokesperson said earlier this month.
Higher prices and border delays
The government estimates the new checks will cost British businesses about £330 million ($419 million) annually and increase food inflation by about 0.2 percentage points over three years.
But the Cold Chain Federation, which represents businesses delivering goods that need chilled storage, has come up with a much larger sum. It calculates that the new border measures could easily add more than £1 billion ($1.3 billion) a year in costs to firms trading perishable produce, even before fruit and vegetables, which are likely to face fewer checks, are included.
An additional cost of that scale will “significantly increase food prices and reduce choice,” the federation’s CEO Phil Pluck wrote in a letter to environment and food minister Steve Barclay earlier this month.
“We also believe that this will seriously threaten the viability of small and medium-sized enterprises operating within food retail, such as small garden centres, restaurants, and delicatessens,” he added.