Spain’s fruit and vegetable exports to the UK have suffered “no basic disruption” from Brexit regardless of salad shortages in British supermarkets and added prices for exporters, the nation’s agriculture minister has mentioned.
Echoing the UK authorities’s rationalization, Luis Planas mentioned an absence of cucumbers, lettuces and tomatoes in shops partly mirrored frosty temperatures in southern Spain, which had slowed manufacturing in latest weeks. However he informed the Monetary Instances the scarcity was “an anomaly not a development”.
For Spanish exporters to the UK, Brexit had meant burdensome new “administrative procedures that include extra bills and extra difficulties”, Planas mentioned. “Not being within the EU’s single market has a major value.”
However regardless of that, he mentioned “issues have gone properly” general in Spain’s post-Brexit meals commerce with the UK, together with its position because the nation’s largest single provider of recent greens.
Commerce knowledge exhibits that though the worth of vegetable shipments from Spain has elevated for the reason that Brexit buying and selling regime got here into impact at the beginning of 2021, the amount has dropped.
Planas acknowledged that smaller-scale producers of wine, cheese and olive oil have had a very exhausting time accepting larger prices. “Some, actually, have informed me that they’ve stopped sending to the UK,” he mentioned.
Others had lower the frequency of deliveries to cut back prices and the executive burden related to every particular person cargo, leaving UK consumers with much less flexibility to answer surges in demand or new traits.
“You may’t do ‘simply in time’. From a business perspective, it poses extra difficulties,” Planas mentioned. “If you end up throughout the EU you possibly can very simply ship a small order to a buyer. Now our small exporters — I’m pondering of exporters of artisanal cheese or wine — inform me they group shipments collectively so as a substitute of weekly they ship month-to-month, bimonthly or quarterly.”
Commerce knowledge doesn’t level to a transparent development in Spanish gross sales to the UK. The worth of Britain’s Spanish cheese imports hit a file of €43mn final yr as volumes rose, however wine shipments have been down in quantity and worth in 2022.
Fruit and greens are offered on a far bigger scale, with the UK importing roughly €1bn of Spanish produce in every class yearly since 2020 and Spain accounting for about 30 per cent of the EU’s whole manufacturing.
Whereas fruit shipments to the UK have declined up to now two years, the rising worth of vegetable gross sales means the nation has maintained its rating as Spain’s second-biggest marketplace for tomatoes and cucumbers after Germany.
Planas mentioned he had a “message of reassurance” on the UK’s present salad shortages. “There isn’t any basic disruption. There are some issues which have occurred because of a couple of weeks of low temperatures in producing areas, however the provide is assured.”
The agriculture ministry mentioned that as temperatures rise with the change of seasons, the state of affairs can be “regularised”. The essential agricultural areas hit by chilly climate in southern Spain have been Almería and Murcia.
Commerce between the nations has been facilitated, Planas mentioned, by the UK’s repeated delays to introducing sanitary and phytosanitary checks on foodstuffs coming into the nation post-Brexit.
These checks, which embrace well being certifications and in some circumstances bodily inspections, are already being carried out on items from the UK coming into the EU, however have been delayed 4 instances in the other way and are as a result of start on the finish of 2023.
The UK’s second-biggest vegetable provider is the Netherlands, one other EU nation. However Planas famous that since Brexit the UK had signed commerce offers with Australia, New Zealand and in addition Morocco, a north African nation that has risen quickly up the rankings to change into the UK’s third-biggest vegetable provider.
Planas mentioned: “The UK is certainly one of our core markets from an agri-foods perspective and we’re very eager to see that good relationship preserved.”
Extra reporting by Emiko Terazono and Judith Evans in London
