EU Imports and Exports: Food and Agricultural Products

Lord Trees Excerpts

Thursday 2nd May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Trees (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, on securing this debate, and declare my interests as a veterinary surgeon and co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Animal Welfare.

The introduction of these risk-based checks on imported medium-risk and high-risk animal and plant products from the EU is to be welcomed. As noble Lords might imagine, I will focus particularly on the import of animal products. These checks simply create parity with imports from all other third-party countries, and parity with the checks that the EU carries out on our exports to it in the absence of a sanitary and phytosanitary agreement. In that respect, it creates a level playing field for our farmers, and should help rebalance, to some extent, a very distorted trade balance, to which the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, has already referred. In spite of that, as she also mentioned, the EU remains the UK’s biggest market for agri-food exports.

Apart from fairness, the real importance of these checks is biosecurity. These checks, particularly the physical checks, in a risk-based approach, will reduce the risk of importing to the UK infectious diseases in plants, animals and indeed humans. Since imports from the EU constitute such a large proportion of all the food products of animal origin imported into the UK—80% of all the animal-origin foods in 2022—it is critical that the EU is included in biosecurity checks. Despite the relative sophistication of EU animal disease control and surveillance, a number of animal pathogens occur in continental Europe that we want to exclude from the UK animal population. There are also potential public health threats that we want to exclude from food.

Delays in introducing these checks—there have been five since they were announced in 2021—have, historically, created a vulnerability in our UK biosecurity. During that period we have seen, for example, an outbreak of disease in over 200 people in the UK caused by salmonella, likely to have been imported in frozen poultry products from Poland. The new checks should prevent such issues and, much more importantly, reduce the likelihood of major outbreaks of infectious disease in the UK, such as African swine fever, a highly fatal disease of pigs that is spreading westward in continental Europe and can infect a wildlife reservoir—the wild boar. The UK Government estimate that an outbreak of African swine fever in the UK would cost £570 million-odd per annum. Since we import nearly 1 million tonnes of pigmeat every year, mainly from the EU, and the African swine fever virus will persist for many weeks in pig products, African swine fever poses a potent threat to the UK pig population.

With regard to the new checks, I note there is to be a reduction in physical and identity checks on medium-risk products from the rest of the world. This is of some concern, particularly with regard to diseases of global distribution, such as foot and mouth, the outbreak of which in the UK in 2001 cost £8 billion, which equates to £12.8 billion in 2022 prices. Will the Minister assure the House that this will not increase our vulnerability to globally distributed epidemic diseases such as foot and mouth? I should add that an epidemic of infectious disease in UK animals would not just cause colossal direct losses in animal welfare, our farming economy and food security, but lead to international trade restrictions on our global exports, which rely on our freedom from disease status.

Of course, as has been mentioned, there are costs to the implementation of these controls. Logistical challenges include the time-critical nature of some imports, particularly plant products. Furthermore, despite the Government assuring us that the impact on food and drink businesses will be only 0.2% over three years, other organisations predict larger costs and impacts, as the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, mentioned. However, in the context of the vast costs of epidemic disease control and eradication, and in the absence of an SPS agreement with the EU, the costs of these checks to industry, and ultimately to the consumer, are relatively small. I suggest they should be viewed as an insurance premium to reduce the likelihood of much greater potential losses, which could affect animal and human health, and the whole UK economy.