Scotland Food and Drink, a trade body, estimates that seafood traders are losing £ 1 million ($ 1.4 million) a day, meaning that some businesses will still fail. Donna Fordyce, CEO of Seafood Scotland, said the price of various species of seafood destined for EU markets has dropped between 40% and 50% because processors are struggling to bring the products to Europe.
“Losses to the sector are accumulating and the situation is urgent,” she said in a statement last week.
One company, which normally ships £ 1 million ($ 1.4 million) of seafood to the European Union each week, managed to put just £ 12,000 ($ 16,300) of the product on the block last week and told its 27 suppliers to stop fishing.
“Getting anything out of the UK into the EU is being achieved by luck, not design,” said Fordyce. “This was inevitable, given that such a complicated process was set up at the last minute.”
After months of tense negotiations, the United Kingdom and the European Union reached a post-Brexit trade agreement on December 24, leaving almost no time for companies and customs officials to familiarize themselves with the new rules that emerged on January 1.
“What they want us to do now is simply impossible to work with live mollusks. Deadlines, costs involved, paperwork, it’s crazy,” Allan Miller, owner of Aberdeen-based AM Shellfish, told CNN Business outside Downing Street on Monday.
“If they don’t change [the process] many of these companies will close their doors, “he said.” Many of these fishing communities have been fishing for generations. What are they going to do? ”
Speaking in Oxford on Monday, Johnson said that UK exporters would be compensated for the losses caused by bureaucratic delays. He described the current problems as “initial problems” and said the government had set up a £ 100 million ($ 136 million) fund to help the British fishing industry take advantage of “great opportunities”.
The prime minister also blamed the closure of restaurants in Europe for the drop in demand for fish from the UK.
Problems in Scotland
DR Collin & Sons, a seafood company based south of Edinburgh, typically ships one to two trucks a day to France, each loaded with £ 150,000 ($ 204,000) of live lobsters, crabs and crayfish. The company, which employs 200 people, has lost more than 90% of its revenue since January 1, according to transportation chief David Rosie.
“We are one of the biggest companies, but it certainly doesn’t look good in the future. For smaller companies, they have weeks, maybe days,” he told CNN Business.
Having dismissed truck drivers and factory workers, the 70-year-old company has shipped more lobster to Asia by air freight than it has sold to neighbors in Europe. “We are selling more to China and the Far East than to the EU, which is unprecedented in the sector,” he added.
Rosie said the company was unable to obtain the correct paperwork from the British customs and revenue authorities to transport its products through France. He had to return the fish to the sea because he cannot get the products to customers quickly enough.
Some fishermen are making a 72 hour round trip across the North Sea to Denmark to expedite entry into Europe so that their catch “really finds its way to the market while it is still fresh enough to meet the demands of customers “, according to the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation.
“Many in our industry now fear for their future,” said Elspeth Macdonald, the federation’s CEO, in a letter to Johnson on Friday. The fisheries deal is “desperately bad” and is not what the UK government has promised the industry, she added.
McMillan has threatened to dump rotten seafood outside UK parliament buildings if he and other Scottish exporters are unable to get their product to market.
– Will Godley and Sarah Dean contributed the reportg.