UK salad shortages not down to Brexit, says Spain

Spain’s fruit and vegetable exports to the UK have suffered “no fundamental disruption” from Brexit despite salad shortages in British supermarkets and added costs for exporters, the country’s agriculture minister has said.

Echoing the UK government’s explanation, Luis Planas said a lack of cucumbers, lettuces and tomatoes in stores partly reflected frosty temperatures in southern Spain, which had slowed production in recent weeks. But he told the Financial Times the shortage was “an anomaly not a trend”.

For Spanish exporters to the UK, Brexit had meant burdensome new “administrative procedures that come with additional expenses and additional difficulties”, Planas said. “Not being in the EU’s single market has a significant cost.”

But despite that, he said “things have gone well” overall in Spain’s post-Brexit food trade with the UK, including its role as the country’s biggest single supplier of fresh vegetables.

Trade data shows that although the value of vegetable shipments from Spain has increased since the Brexit trading regime came into effect at the start of 2021, the volume has dropped.

Planas acknowledged that smaller-scale producers of wine, cheese and olive oil have had a particularly hard time accepting higher costs. “Some, honestly, have told me that they’ve stopped sending to the UK,” he said.

Others had cut the frequency of deliveries to reduce costs and the administrative burden associated with each individual shipment, leaving UK buyers with less flexibility to respond to surges in demand or new trends.

“You can’t do ‘just in time’. From a commercial point of view, it poses more difficulties,” Planas said. “When you are within the EU you can very easily send a small order to a customer. Now our small exporters — I’m thinking of exporters of artisanal cheese or wine — tell me they group shipments together so instead of weekly they ship monthly, bimonthly or quarterly.”

Trade data does not point to a clear trend in Spanish sales to the UK. The value of Britain’s Spanish cheese imports hit a record of €43mn last year as volumes rose, but wine shipments were down in volume and value in 2022.

A worker closes a sack full of olives to upload it to a trailer in Jaen, Spain. The country accounts for about 30% of the EU’s entire produce yield © Carlos Gil/Getty Images

Fruit and vegetables are sold on a far larger scale, with the UK importing roughly €1bn of Spanish produce in each category every year since 2020 and Spain accounting for about 30 per cent of the EU’s entire production.

While fruit shipments to the UK have declined in the past two years, the rising value of vegetable sales means the country has maintained its ranking as Spain’s second-biggest market for tomatoes and cucumbers after Germany.

Planas said he had a “message of reassurance” on the UK’s current salad shortages. “There is no fundamental disruption. There are some problems that have occurred as a result of a few weeks of low temperatures in producing areas, but the supply is guaranteed.”

The agriculture ministry said that as temperatures rise with the change of seasons, the situation would be “regularised”. The crucial agricultural regions hit by cold weather in southern Spain were Almería and Murcia.

Recommended

Trade between the countries has been facilitated, Planas said, by the UK’s repeated delays to introducing sanitary and phytosanitary checks on foodstuffs entering the country post-Brexit.

These checks, which include health certifications and in some cases physical inspections, are already being carried out on goods from the UK entering the EU, but have been delayed four times in the opposite direction and are due to begin at the end of 2023.

The UK’s second-biggest vegetable supplier is the Netherlands, another EU country. But Planas noted that since Brexit the UK had signed trade deals with Australia, New Zealand and also Morocco, a north African country that has risen rapidly up the rankings to become the UK’s third-biggest vegetable supplier.

Planas said: “The UK is one of our core markets from an agri-foods point of view and we are very keen to see that good relationship preserved.”

Additional reporting by Emiko Terazono and Judith Evans in London