European Agri-Food Trade and Brexit: The First 3 Years of the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement

Brexit marked the beginning of a new era in European trade, with implications for global commerce as the United Kingdom has sought to broaden its import sources for agricultural commodities. Since formally leaving the European Union on January 31, 2020, the United Kingdom has kept strong, but weakening, trade links to the European bloc. This analysis seeks to quantify the degree of change in the trade dynamic across a range of agri-food and related commodity groups. This analysis is done by measuring the difference in trade trends between United Kingdom and the European Union relative to the rest of the world and their average bilateral trade over the last decade. The following is addressed: • Do post-Brexit trends for European Union-United Kingdom agri-food trade differ from their trade with the rest of the world? • Which product categories experienced the largest relative changes? Key findings include: • United Kingdom trade openness is high in agri-food relative to other regions but has contracted since 2016. • Relative to trade with the rest of the world, rates of agri-food trade growth in the European Union and the United Kingdom suggest that both regions are diversifying to other trading partners despite observed increases in bilateral trade.