Food price fears as Brexit import charges revealed
Fees of up £145 will be levied on imports of fish, salami, sausage, cheese and yoghurt, the government says.
bUt MuH bEtTeR tRaDe dEaLs?
Brexit was the dumbest idea. An idiotic idea, peddled by idiots, and voted for by idiot racists
Peddled by disaster capitalists and Russian money/propaganda.
And now the Tories want to pull us from the ECHR, to tear away workers rights and further privatise everything to funnel money into their own bank accounts.
It's damn sad there will never be a "we fucking told you so" moment, because the useful idiots that were used as fodder in this whole mess are too fucking thick to ever understand the gravity of it all.
Brexit was such a monumental mistake. Worse than the US electing Trump once, but probably not worse than electing Trump twice.
It's like this was a bad idea from the start. If only someone had said something back then!
I was so excited about Corbyn until he dragged his feet during the remain Champaign, his only time on the wrong side of history.
God fucking damn it.
Rishi: we have a plan for tackling the cost of living crisis.
The plan:
There are a long list of concerns that I'd have about Brexit. This isn't that high on the list, and I don't think that it's going to be that bad in terms of cost of living.
Small imports of products such as fish, salami, sausage, cheese and yoghurt will be subject to fees of up to £145 from 30 April, according to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).
My guess is that the vendors getting whacked by this are basically EU stores that had sold directly to consumers, probably more gourmet stuff. My guess is that that's generally not the least-costly option. Like, instead of mail-ordering cheese from France, one can probably get cheese -- albeit perhaps not exactly the same type -- at a grocery store in the UK. The consumers getting whacked by this are people who care enough about a specific type of cheese to want to mail order it, and where the demand is small enough that grocery stores aren't stocking it.
I know that The Guardian did a handful of interviews with a cheesemonger who was dealing with this going the other direction -- selling small orders of gourmet cheese from the UK into the EU -- and he was talking about how much of a problem this was going to be for him. googles Yeah, Cheshire Cheese. Anything that raises the transaction cost of crossing the border is gonna be bad news for people who do a lot of transactions. At the time, I was commenting on Reddit that what he should do is probably set up a distributor in the EU, then ship larger orders there, then ship from that distribution center to customers.
Following up, it looks like he did indeed do roughly that. Basically, he sold his company to a larger company, which had EU-based distribution:
Its new owner, fellow family-run north-west England producer Joseph Heler Cheese, has maintained a presence in the EU as a result of its larger operations and distribution hub in the Netherlands, which Spurrell hopes will make supplying European customers viable again.
I mean, don't get me wrong. It sucks, and it's going to reduce choice on both sides of the English Channel, and increase costs. But I don't think that it's comparable to, for example, the problems that it creates for British-EU-spanning automakers, which rely on a just-in-time-based supply chain.
And don't get me wrong. I'm -- in the US -- in the same boat as people in the UK who want their specific French cheeses. One of my favorite cheeses is Red Windsor, which isn't something manufactured in the US -- just in the UK. So if I want it, I have to order it from the UK or a US distributor that imports it from the UK and get whacked by US import tariffs, and despite efforts from the UK (including vigorously-Stilton-trade-agreement-advocating Liz Truss), the UK didn't set up a cheese FTA with the US. At least with the TCA between the EU and UK, there aren't any tariffs. What the article is talking about is just a processing fee for imports, and you can reduce the impact for anything for which there is sufficient demand and doesn't need to be customized on a per-customer basis by importing in larger quantities and then having a British distributor dole it out to individual customers.
And even for me, it's not that bad. At the end of the day, I can suck it up, go order it from a distributor and pay the price. And I really don't need a very specific brand of British cheese, even if I like it and would prefer to have it readily-available. It's a luxury. It's a luxury that I like, yes, but it can't really be said that I'm experiencing hardship if I have to eat a different type of cheese.
For me, the reason it sucks is that it plays into the hands of huge homogeneous businesses, while making life very difficult for companies supplying nice products in low volume, DTC.
Instead of me being able to order a kilo of nice stinky cheese from a french shop (or small UK shop), I either have to hope one of the supermarkets starts carrying it, or hop on the ferry and go to Super U myself.
(Honestly, I can see myself doing more day-trips to france at this rate! Good excuse to fill the boot of the car with produce, assuming exemptions are in place for personal use)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Small imports of products such as fish, salami, sausage, cheese and yoghurt will be subject to fees of up to £145 from 30 April, according to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).
He added that the government had "announced the charges at the last minute, leaving affected businesses little time to revise their commercial arrangements".
The fee has been introduced to pay for border inspections and fund new facilities in Kent to protect biosecurity - preventing the import of plant and animal disease.
Labour said British shoppers and businesses were "rightly worried about prices being driven up again" and that it had warned about the "potential for chaos" from new border checks.
A spokesperson said: "The charges follow extensive consultation with industry and a cap has been set specifically to help smaller businesses.
We are committed to supporting businesses of all sizes and across all sectors as they adapt to new border checks and maintaining the smooth flow of imported goods."
The original article contains 631 words, the summary contains 164 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I'm a buyer for a wholesaler and import a lot of food. I'm having to discontinue most of my imported dairy products now as this additional charge makes it no longer worth it.
Tories, the anti-business party.
And here is an ABSOLUTELY PROPHETIC video about the current situation :-)
