‘It won’t be easy’: the European exporters battling Brexit bureaucracy

Paperwork and Covid culminate in another year of headaches for food and wine producers

For more than two decades, Unexport has shipped millions of kilograms of produce annually from farms in the southern Spanish region of Murcia to clients in the UK. Brexit has transformed the relatively straightforward process into a bureaucratic nightmare, yielding border waiting times of up to 10 hours for lorries laden with lemons and lettuce, said Domingo Llamas, its president.

Given the damage already inflicted by the UK’s exit from the bloc, plus the coronavirus pandemic, he sees the final implementation of thrice-delayed checks as just “one other thing” to manage.

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