London,UK: British sausages makers, along with makers of meat products, could lose their EU markets come 1 January unless the government negotiates an exemption to EU rules that require prepared meat products to be imported frozen.
The meat industry fears EU customers will look elsewhere for premium chilled products.
“It’s a real problem, in the sense that historically the British meat industry is fully integrated with EU member states, particularly the Republic of Ireland, and has been for 40 years,” said Peter Hardwick, trade policy adviser, British Meat Processors Association.
Freezing meat is expensive, reduces the quality of the product and requires the recipients on the EU side to have facilities to defrost meat. As a result many would simply not take frozen products, the British Meat Processors Association said.
Gavin Morris, the group veterinary manager for Dunbia, the meat processing company supplied by 30,000 British and Irish farmers, said the requirement to send frozen meat would put a “huge question mark” over many existing contracts.
“The view we’ve gathered is that a lot of existing commercial contracts for products and preparations to go to the EU fresh will just stop — the clients will say ‘we don’t want it frozen, thanks very much, we’ll source from somewhere else’,” he said.
