Selling “innovative British jams” to France was only an hors d’oeuvre for the United Kingdom’s Brexporting feast. The post-Brexit plan for enhancing the U.K.’s culinary fame now also envisions selling beer to Germany, whisky to Japan, poultry to China, and tea to India. (In other news, the U.K. will be shipping snow to Canada.)
Theresa May’s government, which is negotiating plans to leave the world’s largest trading bloc, intends to drive the country forward with a rejuvenated export sector. (The pound has conveniently fallen to its lowest level against the dollar in several decades, which could certainly help.) Food and drink is the country’s largest manufacturing sector, and will be at the heart of the upcoming Brexit negotiations.
It’s easy to laugh (or cry) at a country staking its economic future on the one thing it has been famously, even indulgently, bad at. In some ways, the plan floats on the same current of deluded, nationalistic British grandeur that propelled the Brexit campaign. “The UK is renowned for its excellent food and drink,” the report begins, as sunny as the London sky. If there is a foodie culture in the U.K., it is eclectic and internationalist, inextricably tied up in the country’s postwar immigration boom. How fitting that a government that came to power largely on anti-immigrant sentiment now aims to promote traditional British foodstuffs abroad.
Of course, that easy mockery is a little flippant. The U.K.’s “Food Is Great” campaign won’t be loading up the holds with crates of newsprint-wrapped fish and chips. (Actually, the government hopes to get seed potatoes into China, but you get the idea.) Instead, it will focus on U.K. products that tourists like, such as chocolate, cheese, salmon, and whisky.
Still, it’s an uphill battle, and not just because the “Food Is Great” campaign could be mistaken for a Monty Python skit. The top five markets for U.K. food and drink exports are Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Spain. Food and drink exports to non-EU markets are growing faster than to the EU, as you might expect, but the EU is the destination for more than 70 percent of the country’s food and drink exports. And once the Brexit process begins, the U.K. will have to renegotiate access to the continent’s common market. It’s virtually impossible they come away with a better deal than they have now.
All told, the food plan seems to underestimate just how much work it will be to renegotiate dozens of international trade deals. Selling beef to Japan, for example, forms “a key part of our plans to grow exports,” a government official told Buzzfeed on Wednesday. But British beef has been banned in Japan since 2001, due to fears of mad cow disease.
That doesn’t mean the Japanese won’t ever want a steak from cows raised on Yorkshire grass, or wouldn’t buy them a few years down the road. But it reminds us that the food and drink plan, like Brexit itself, is dozens of prolix trade deals away from being even theoretically beneficial.
Fittingly, the EU merits only one mention in the Food and Drink Action Plan. That Brexit will usher in a period of “greater openness” with partners in Europe, as the plan assures, is a piece of magical thinking that makes hawking innovative jam to France look level-headed. More likely, the EU will say, “So long, and thanks for the 127 million GBP of salmon shipped in the first half of 2016.”
