Due to the chaos caused by Brexit, the European Union suspended the import of some Scottish seafood products until next Monday. According to the Guardian on the 14th, after the official Brexit, Scottish seafood entered the EU market due to health inspection, IT system update and customs documents problems.
If the customs clearance problem is not solved in time, the Scottish seafood industry with an annual output value of more than 1 billion pounds will be in crisis.
According to the report, according to the new regulations after Brexit, each box of seafood products must be unloaded from trucks and subject to sanitary quarantine one by one before leaving Scotland. Previously, it took one or two days to ship seafood from Glasgow, Scotland, to Boulogne, France, but now it takes three days.
At present, it is mainly small seafood exporters who encounter customs clearance difficulties. Previously, small exporters could aggregate their exports in batches, but this did not work after Brexit, and the single-batch large-scale export model of seafood exporters has not been seriously affected.
Starting from Friday, Denmark United Steamboat Co., Ltd. (DFDS), one of Europe’s largest suppliers of seafood import and export logistics services, suspended logistics business for a large number of Scottish seafood exports to the European Union, planning to clarify the logistics clearance process after Brexit in about a week, and resume service next Monday.
Jimmy Buchan, chief executive of the Scottish Seafood Association, said that the delay in customs clearance was related to the poor performance of the new computer system that only went online on December 28 last year.
Buchan complained that it took two years to prepare for Brexit, but there were still problems, while the government was sitting by and watch the merchants get into trouble.
According to Reuters, some French and Spanish merchants have recently begun to refuse to accept seafood imported from Scotland due to concerns that the long customs clearance time of seafood products will affect product quality.
Dissatisfied with the damage to their own interests, several Scottish exporters shouted at British Prime Minister Johnson on social media, saying that they were fighting for survival and demanding that Johnson solve the problem immediately.
In addition, many Scottish fishermen no longer go fishing, and the market price of seafood has also begun to fall. Some Scottish fishermen have threatened to pile up decayed shellfish at the gate of the British Parliament in protest if the customs clearance issue is not resolved next week.
In response, British Cabinet Secretary of Staff Gove said in the British Parliament that the government will work to ensure the smooth and rapid customs clearance of seafood products.
According to the Financial Times, the British government proposes to speed up the process of trucks delivering food to supermarkets to return to the continent to reload goods to avoid food shortages in the UK.
The UK Department of Agriculture sent a document to the industry on Tuesday saying that the possibility of further disruptions in logistics between the UK and the European Union is still high.
