As a result of the agreement, officials say Irish food exports will be able to access "green lanes" when they come off ferries traveling from British to continental ports.
According to Bord Bia, 35% of Irish food and drink exports worth €13bn went to the single market last year, up 7% on 2018, and surpassing the UK for the first time. This will limit formalities on Irish industrial goods transiting through Britain. However, the regime for food and live animals comes under a different set of rules. Irish and EU officials had been discussing the problem in the run up to 31 October last year, when it looked as if the UK might leave the EU without concluding a Withdrawal Agreement.
The OCR legislation was prompted by repeated food safety scandals and had taken several years to evolve. While the European Commission was aware of Irish concerns, Dublin believed the issue still had not been resolved, with the transition period coming to an end in just over six months' time. Under the new OCR legislation, both live animals and food products arriving via the UK land bridge would have been subject to the EU's digital pre-notification system known as TRACES.
"You would have to have a cert for each type of animal product, so you'd have to have a dairy cert for your butter, you'd have to have a meat cert for your meat," one official familiar with the negotiations told RTÉ News.Ireland circulated a working paper, seen by RTÉ News, to the member states involved - Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands - and to the European Commission setting out a proposed workaround.
"That work is being done on a technical level and there doesn't seem to be any issue," one EU official told RTÉ News. "We've found solutions to all the issues raised by Ireland."
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