IDM ¦ Column
A new start?
EU-UK Cooperation and Trade Agreement
Author: Alexander Anton, EDA Secretary General
After the more than painful divorce process, the UK left
legally the European Union a year ago on 31 January
2020. The very last-minute conclusion of the EU-UK Cooperation
and Trade Agreement, signed on 30 December
2020, hence 24 hours before the end of the transition
period, had given some hope that the two partners would have
finally understood that a pragmatic approach would benefit both sides.
Once more in this process, the politics of the UK and the EU deceived.
Last October 9, a few weeks before the end of the transition
period on 31 December 2020, we hosted a Brexit workshop to
urge the negotiation partners to take our dairy concerns serious.
We welcomed H.E. Katrina Williams, UK Deputy Ambassador to
the EU, Peter Giørtz-Carlsen, CEO of Arla Food Europe and Brigitte
Misonne, Head of Unit in DG AGRI (EU Commission). The speakers’
interventions led to engaging conversations and showed a high
level of understanding of the special dairy situation with fully interlinked
supply chains between the UK and the EU.
In the follow-up of this workshop, both administrations underlined
their commitment to solve our dairy issues and answered quite a few of
our burning questions related to the end of the transition period.
The competent EU Commission and UK services acted. EDA President
Michel Nalet stated “We raised our dairy concerns with the negotiating
teams. Even if quite a few of our questions remain unanswered and
even if some of the answers are not as precise as we would have wished,
the partners underlined their commitment to the European lactosphère
in taking the time to answer our questions. Our concerns were heard!”
In the last weeks of 2020, unprecedented efforts to reach a compromise
to manage the end of the transition period were made by both
sides of the negotiation teams. Over the past four and a half years, the
negotiation teams, especially Michel Barnier led UK Task Force of the EU
Photo: nito – stock.adobe.com
28 · January/February 2021 ¦ international-dairy.com
/stock.adobe.com
/international-dairy.com
