DM Monitoring
LONDON: Many Scottish fishermen have halted exports to European Union markets after post-Brexit bureaucracy shattered the system that used to put fresh langoustines and scallops in French shops just over a day after they were harvested.
Fishing exporters told Reuters their businesses could become unviable after the introduction of health certificates, customs declarations and other paperwork added days to their delivery times and hundreds of pounds to the cost of each load.
Business owners said they had tried to send small deliveries to France and Spain to test the new systems this week but it was taking five hours to secure a health certificate in Scotland, a document which is required to apply for other customs paperwork.
In the first working week after Brexit, one-day deliveries were taking three or more days – if they got through at all. Several owners could not say for sure where their valuable cargo was. A trade group told fishermen to stop fishing exported stocks.
“Our customers are pulling out,” Santiago Buesa of SB Fish told Reuters. “We are fresh product and the customers expect to have it fresh, so they’re not buying. It’s a catastrophe.” On Thursday evening, the Scottish fishing industry’s biggest logistics provider DFDS Scotland told customers it had taken the “extraordinary step” of halting until Monday export groupage, when multiple product lines are carried, to try to fix IT issues, paperwork errors and the backlog. Scotland harvests vast quantities of langoustines, scallops, oysters, lobsters and mussels from sea fisheries along its bracing Atlantic coast which are rushed by truck to grace the tables of European diners in Paris, Brussels and Madrid.
But Britain’s departure from the EU’s orbit is the biggest change to its trade since the launch of the Single Market in 1993, introducing reams of paperwork and costs that must be completed to move goods across the new customs border. Those trading in food and livestock face the toughest requirements, hitting the express delivery of freshly caught fish that used to move overnight from Scotland, via England, into France, before going on to other European markets in days.
