Farm organisations in the UK have been surprisingly timid in reacting to the threats arising from Brexit. The UK has resigned from the EU, effective 29 March next year.

That means the end of CAP membership and no successor deal for trade with the EU27 is in sight. It is virtually impossible to conceive a sequence of events that would see Britain somehow end up remaining in the European Union. Some lawyers have argued that the Article 50 resignation letter could be revoked by the UK but this looks like a political non-starter.

There will, barring accidents, be a transition deal which postpones actual exit but the die is cast for British farmers – they will soon be outside the CAP and the internal market. The EU has offered a transition lasting only until the end of 2020.

From that date, UK agriculture will be departing, on current policy, both the customs union and the single market and the problems ensuing for Britain’s trade in food and agricultural products will emerge very quickly. There is no precedent for a broad successor deal on agri-trade with a country outside both the single market and customs union.

Income supports

Outside the CAP, income support payments in the UK will come exclusively from the Treasury and their long-term value is no more than a political promise. It is the UK government’s declared policy to quit both single market and customs union and Mrs May has reiterated her commitment to this form of hard Brexit on several occasions recently.

This would see the UK become a third country promptly on 1 January 2021, with little likelihood of a successor deal that would cover food and agriculture. The loss of certainty about income support would then be the least of the headaches for UK farmers.

One of the most puzzling Brexiteer assertions is that the UK’s current regulatory alignment with the EU is so comprehensive, as a result of single market membership, that this is a better starting position for negotiations than would be the case for a third country seeking a trade deal from scratch. But in the absence of a successor deal which covers food and agriculture on something close to today’s terms, the UK will indeed be starting from scratch, as a non-member with no agreed terms of access.

Forty-five years of tariff-free trade for the UK and 25 years without non-tariff barriers or customs delays have dulled the collective memory. Nobody seems to remember what it used to be like and many people seem to be sleepwalking towards a very sudden discovery of what third-country status would mean for UK agriculture.

This is not just about the land border in Ireland – mainland UK does far more trade in food and agricultural products, in both directions, with continental Europe than Northern Ireland does with the Republic.

If the post-2021 successor trade pact is modelled on the deal the UK has recently concluded with Canada, there is no prospect that current volumes of food and agricultural trade between the UK and the EU27 could continue.

Aside entirely from the tariffs and quotas that would arise, EU trade with third countries is governed by a raft of detailed regulations and inspection requirements which will add extra cost. Some of that cost would be capital spend for importing countries, which are required under EU regulations to have adequate capacity at designated border control points at or near ports. There is just one at an Irish seaport (Dublin).

The reason there are so few, and of limited capacity, is because most current trade in food and agri-products is internal EU trade not requiring inspection. Customs inspection, for tariff compliance, is a separate and additional logistic requirement. There will be extra cost for hauliers – add just an hour of delay at each Irish Sea port and the 24-hour round trip could become impossible.

Influence

The farm lobby in the UK is far less influential than in Ireland. Most farmers are natural Conservative voters but under the first-past-the-post electoral system there are simply too few in the shire constituencies to make a difference, since the Tories enjoy huge majorities in so many of these seats. In Ireland, the multi-seat system means the farm vote cannot so readily be ignored and there are relatively more farmers.

Michel Barnier’s clock is ticking. Unless government policy changes soon, it is ticking towards a more threatening cliff edge for British farmers than their representatives seem to appreciate.