Orders for almost 100,000 trees have been cancelled by Northern Ireland buyers because of a post-Brexit ban on the plants being moved from Britain, the Guardian can reveal.
Leaders in the business say it is a major setback for tree-planting programmes in Belfast and elsewhere in the region.
The Woodland Trust in Northern Ireland has just cancelled an order for 22,000 trees, which were destined for schools and communities as part of a Northern Ireland greening project.
“It’s disaster. They’re just stopping any exports from mainland UK over to Northern Ireland. We can’t get any trees over from from any of the nurseries that would usually deal with over there,” said Gregor Fulton, estate and outreach manager at the trust.
Scotland-based Alba trees, one of the biggest suppliers in Britain, sells around 250,000 a year to Northern Ireland a year says it has also been hit.
“At a stroke Brexit has taken away a huge chunk of our business,” said Craig Turner, chief executive.
“We turned down an order of 70,000 oak couple of weeks ago because we can’t ship them,” he said.
And Belfast city council, which has an ambitious tree-planting programme involving 1m plants confirmed it had a delivery of “300 large specimen trees” from a supplier in England “delayed due to new rules around the movement of plants into NI from GB”.
The horticulture division that Brexit has created between Britain and Northern Ireland is expected to be raised at meeting between local business leaders with Maroš Šefčovič on Thursday. The issue is one of many problems caused by Brexit including a ban on the export of live shellfish to the EU.
“We thought it would be teething problems that would be resolved quickly. It just seems ludicrous really,” said Fulton.
“The irony is that I can now get a tree easier from Latvia than I can from Britain, which totally undermines all the work on biosecurity,” he adds referring to the risk of importing pests and diseases.
The problem arises from three new rules applying to Northern Ireland, which is observing EU customs and regulatory rules on plants and animals as part of the Northern Ireland protocol.
A ban on British soil being moved into northern Ireland emerged two weeks ago with garden centres protesting about a block on supplies from British nurseries.
Fulton says he has been told washing all the soil off roots could be the solution.
“That’s just not practical. We got an order in last year of 56,000 trees in one go. You can’t wash 56,000 trees roots. It would be too big a cost and the nurseries are just not going to do that,” he said.
If bare-rooted trees were available in sufficient quantities, buyers would then face Brexit paperwork involving health certification and customs for the plants.
A further barrier stems from the EU’s list of species prohibited or restricted for import from third countries, which now includes the UK.
The list is designed to protect Europe from diseases and pests but includes native trees including oaks, alder and birch, important for native mixed woodlands.
Mike Harvey, director at Maelor Forest Nurseries in Wales, which sells about 32m trees a year, said it too has had to stop selling to Northern Ireland with a recent order for 1,000 oaks about to be cancelled.
But what enrages Harvey is not so much the ban on movement of trees to Northern Ireland but the continued importation of trees from Ireland for forestation projects.
He says Brexit gives the UK an opportunity to close the border to EU trees and give the country a fighting chance of stopping the “drift of disease from south-east Europe to the north-west”.
The diseases, which some put down to climate change, include ash dieback, and the Xylella disease, which has come into the UK via olive trees and can affect several species of broadleaved trees.
“It’s typical that the EU puts these restrictions in place and applies them rigorously in Northern Ireland but we leave the borders open to trees coming in from the EU including Ireland and the Netherlands,” he says.
“If we want to control disease and gives ourselves a chance, it’s actually a good thing to stop these transportation of trees between our islands,” said Harvey.
source https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/feb/17/brexit-forces-northern-ireland-buyers-to-cancel-orders-for-100000-trees
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