Brexit delays export of even crustacean in Europe – 04/11/2023 – World

Of all the pesky regulations Brexit has imposed on Paul Knight’s shellfish export business, the one he finds most absurd is this: Before he can deliver his crabs and lobsters to France and Spain, they must be certified by a veterinarian.

“I have nothing against vets, they are lovely people,” said Knight, managing director of PDK Shellfish, as he and his team prepared the bulky forms now needed to send a truck from Scotland. “But when do you take your pet lobster to the vet?”

Brexit has left Knight and other Scottish exporters strapped, adding reams of paperwork and extra checkpoints that slow down shipments, causing crustaceans to die en route.

When it took effect in January 2021, brexit ended an era of easy trade with its markets in continental Europe. Knight compares the impact to a bomb going off under his company.

It didn’t do him much good personally either. He started smoking, a habit he thought he had kicked. Knight has little time for cycling or other exercise and works every weekend. The result, he said, was a gain of more than 40 kg.

But the impact has also been felt in the seafood trade, from the teams on the Scottish islands that catch lobsters, crabs and crayfish, to those serving them to customers in high-end restaurants in France.

Fishing

At dawn over the rocky west coast of Scotland, a pair of dolphins race alongside the Dignity Jay, a nine-metre boat heading out to retrieve crustacean traps from the depths.

Slowing to a stop, the boat rocks and gulls circle as traps are hoisted aboard and emptied, with shiny black lobsters and muddy brown crabs released and stored on deck.

None of that catch will remain in Britain. This is the start of a 1,440km journey for customers in France, who will pay top dollar for seafood that most Britons rarely eat.

Before Brexit, this was relatively straightforward. But now, because of all the extra paperwork required, Alastair Mackie, the captain of the Dignity Jay, must deliver his catch early. So he will finish fishing at 11:30 am, instead of 5 pm, to load the product on a ferry from the Isle of Mull to Oban, on the Scottish mainland.

Each week, PDK Shellfish sends several large trucks from the warehouse in the port of Oban to France and Spain, loaded with tons of seafood kept alive in tanks filled with seawater through which air is pumped. The cargo this time will include crab and lobster from the Dignity Jay and crayfish from another boat, the Fern.

Each delivery is a race against time. Dead crustaceans are worthless, and the longer they are out of the sea, the greater the chance they will perish. Brexit has made the odds worse.

It’s not the only complication. A strike in France means trucks have to leave even earlier. But it’s mostly the extra paperwork that makes companies like PDK complain, because it affects every shipment. Under Brexit rules, every vehicle needs exhaustive paperwork listing every kilogram of species transported and details of each boat that delivered it.

The trip

A Scania truck loaded with around 40,000 kilos of lobster, crayfish and crab leaves the PDK warehouse at 20:20 on Sunday and its first and brief stop is at a warehouse in Glasgow, Scotland, to pick up the veterinary certificate.

There he is received by Andrew Graham, who will take him to France and back. He normally takes a trip like this once every two weeks, accompanied by another driver if the trip continues to Spain. This time he is alone and will drive through the night. He says he doesn’t mind the loneliness.

At dawn on Monday, Graham, 29, is not far from Portsmouth, on England’s south coast, where a ferry to France will depart. With mandatory breaks to combat fatigue, he’s been on the road for over eight hours.

Graham voted for Brexit in 2016. “It wasn’t like they said it would be,” he said, driving through morning traffic in southern England. Rather, he asserted, it is “a kind of plague”.

The wait in Portsmouth for the ferry to depart is long this time – around four hours – and Graham gets some sleep in the cabin. On the other side of the English Channel there will inevitably be a delay at a veterinary inspection post, just a few minutes’ drive from the port of Caen in France.

Trucks are inspected in the order they arrive. “It could take an hour, two, three or four,” said Graham, whose longest wait was five hours. “You waste a lot of time there.”

the landing

Leaving the ferry on Monday, Graham is tenth in a line of 12 trucks. That means almost two hours of waiting for the French veterinary inspection, and it’s almost midnight when he hits the road to drop off some of his cargo near St. Bad. Next stop is a seafood company in the town of Plouescat.

The final mid-morning stop is at Melesse, on the outskirts of Rennes, where hundreds of gallons of Scottish seawater are released from the truck’s tanks, squirting onto grass and asphalt and down a drain. Graham catches some of the escaped crabs and returns them to the tanks.

Inside the warehouse of the wholesaler Ame Haslé, around 130 kilos of lobsters, 1,100 kilos of crabs and 1,200 kilos of crayfish are unloaded into tanks of aerated sea water.

Maxime Sureau, commercial seafood specialist at Ame Haslé, said the brexit disruption initially caused his company to reduce orders from Scotland, but that had returned to previous levels. “We’ve found a way of organizing things that simplifies everything a lot,” he said.

Even so, he added, delays in inspections make it impossible to know when shipments will arrive.