Friday, March 29, 2024

Brexit hiatus gives breathing room

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The meat industry is once again facing a Brexit deadline in the middle of one of its major selling windows for chilled lamb exports to Britain.
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British Prime Minister Theresa May now has till the end of October to get backing from the House of Commons for her plan to withdraw the United Kingdom from the European Union with a 21-month transition during which trade would continue as normal while a comprehensive trade deal with its nearest neighbour is negotiated.

If she fails trade between the UK and the EU again faces being thrown into disarray.

Hold-ups at ports as border officials get to grips with significant new tariffs and documentation threaten disruption to imports into the UK from outside the EU too.

The previous March 31 Brexit date was poor timing for New Zealand meat exporters, coming in the middle of the shipping period for the critical Easter chilled lamb market.

Alliance sales general manager Shane Kingston admits to having breathed a sigh of relief with the passing of the end-of-March deadline without Brexit.

Unfortunately, the new deadline falls during the other critical period for lamb exports to the UK.

“We will be shipping product across that date for Christmas trading. There will be product going before it and there will be a lot of product going after it.

“It is a continuation of what we were experiencing running into March with a high degree of uncertainty and underlying concern if an agreement doesn’t get found.”

More positively, a delay is another chance to resolve the quota dispute threatening more permanent damage to the industry’s lamb trade with the UK and the EU.

A no-deal Brexit would see the immediate implementation of plans for the industry’s longstanding entitlement to sell 228,000 tonnes of sheep meat free of tariffs to the EU to be split 50:50 between the UK and the continent.

NZ has opposed the plan cooked up by the EU and the UK on the grounds it reduces the flexibility exporters have to service markets either on the continent or the UK according to which market delivers the highest returns.

Beef + Lamb international trade manager Esther Guy-Meakin said while further delays to a Brexit decision are causing uncertainty for exporters they give diplomats another chance to work on their EU and UK counterparts.

“This extra time allows the UK and the EU the time to work constructively with trading partners to avoid detrimental and unfair proposals such as their proposal to split our quotas and we will continue to urge them to do so.

“We, of course, maintain our argument that the proposal to split our quotas is essentially cutting back the access that is legally binding under the World Trade Organisation.” 

A Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokeswoman said officials and other Government representatives raised the matter with EU and UK counterparts at a number of meetings in recent months including at the WTO in Geneva.

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