I showed you the information for the EU agricultural exporting to YOU.
Your FDA certificates, those are yours.
It has nothing to do with the EU, on the EU side it is that relevant authority.
Those cites show you what it is like (I show it because you probably are more familiar with your own entities, but it seems not) for the exporter of the EU to send to the USA.
It is the USA authority that is concerned - you see nothing there about the EU side, no? No, you do not.
the exporter has to get all the paperworks, all the cert
Because that is not how things work at all. At all!
If there is not the pre agreement on the joint certification and the paperwork, including the very complicated rules and laws about the standards, the importing country gives no fucks about your FDA. None.
Look at that documentation. That is for an EU exporter sending to you. It will work similarly in the other direction. That is not the same as putting it in a truck and sending it off sans customs clearances.
Inside of the EU it works just like it works sending from the California to the New York.
No pre paperworks.
No preauthorizations
No customs clearances.
This is what I’ve been screaming at WTOers on TV till I’m blue in the face.
You might have regulatory alignment. It doesn’t make suspension of border checks automatic. You need a TREATY to do that.
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At the moment each country enforces the same regulations on its domestic producers. It’s a single market, remember, which means that if I’m producing in, say, Ireland I have to comply with the same standards regardless of whether the product is going to be consumed in Ireland or in, say, Greece. The result is that Greek importers, consumers, etc can buy and consume the produce knowing that it was produced to the same standard as would have applied, had it been produced in Greece. And the Greek authorities don’t need to inspect or regulate the import, since they know the Irish authorities have done that. (In fact, they may not inspect or regulate it in any way that would disadvantage it relative to Greek produce.) And Greek consumers don’t need to be checking the small print on labels to find out where the produce comes from, and educating themselves about different standards that might apply in that place and what measures they need to take before consumiong Irish produce. And vice versa. The result is that I can ship my produce without any controls, inspection, border formalities, etc from Dublin to Greece and market it in Greece without facing any barriers or discrimination or adverse market sentiment.
This isn’t true for a country outside the Single Market. Imports from countries outside the Single Market do have to be inspected, since the authorities in the country of production aren’t committed to applying and enforcing EU standards on producers. This imposes additional costs and delay on importers and/or on the third party producer/exporter. Because they are inspected for compliance with EU standards they only have to be inspected once, at the point of entry into the single market, and can thereafter circulate freely in the market but, still, it’s an expense and/or a delay which puts them at a competetive disadvantage relative to produce of the Single Market.
The whole point of the Single Market is to deliver frictionless trade between and among the participating states. If you set about devising a mechanism for delivering frictionless trade, the Single Market is what you end up with. If you want frictionless trade, you participate in the Single Market. It works beautifully. It’s estimated that the completion of the Single Market in the 1990s added between 3% and 6% to the GDPs of participating countries.
Right. The UK, having left the Single Market, could then try to enter into some kind of Association Agreement with the EU under which they commnit to incorporating EU production standards into their domestic law, and enforcing them on UK producers and on UK importers of produce from third countries, and then seek recognition from the EU that produce imported from the UK can be treated as if it were produce of the Single Market, and therefore not subject to inspection, control, further regulation, etc.
But, if they do that, what’s the point of leaving the Single Market in the first place? In the Single Market, standards are set collectively and the UK participates in setting them. The only difference under this arrangement would be that the UK would be committing to observe standards set collectively, but by a collective which did not include the UK. All that would have changed is that the UK would have lost the (quite signficant) voice it currently has in the setting of market standards. How would that be an improvement?
The only rational reason for withdrawing from the Single Market is that you want something more than you want frictionless trade, and attaining that thing is incompatible with participation in the Single Market. This might be a rational thing to do, but you do need to recognise and accept the trade-off that you are making here.
To clarify, I don’t mean “protect” in the sense of store sales or pricing. “protect” means protection from disease.
My point wasn’t to say it is the same as food safety. My point is that there is a plethora of reasons that checkpoints are needed between a non-member country and the EU. Yeah, they are different situations. That was kind of the point.
Firstly, that it is a crate of lettuce, and not of some different product.
Secondly, evidence as to where it originated. (The fact that it came on a ship from Teapotistan doesn’t mean that it originated in Teapotistan, obviously.) This will be relevant to the question of what tariffs may be due, but it’s also relevant to the question of what market regulatory standards apply.
Once it has been established where the lettuce is from, is it from a country which has an arrnagement in place for the recognition by the EU of its regulatory standards for lettuce? There could be an automatic recognition arrangement - all lettuce from Teapotistan is fine. Or their could be an arrangement under which Teapotistani producers can get EU certification of their produce from an agency in Teapotistan authorised by the EU, in which case, does it have that certification? (The Teapotistani producer would have to pay for this certification, natch.) Or there could be no arrangements at all in place, in which case it’s up to the importer to demonstrate product compliance now. (Which, depending on the nature of the product, may be impossible or not reasonably practicable.)
Possession of the bag of weed in France would get you into difficulty in a way that it wouldn’t in the Netherlands.
But France doesn’t care how or where you got the cannabis; the fact that you purchased it in Amsterdam is of no interest, one way or the other. And there’s no particular attempt made to detect or interdict cannabis on Amsterdam-Paris planes or trains. And if, as you were deplaning in Paris, the cannabis fell out of your pocket and was leaped on by an eagle-eyed policeman who happened to be standing nearby, you wouldn’t be charged with importing cannabis, but with simple possession. (If charged at all; if it’s a modest amount for personal use they might just confiscate it.)
Yeah. The thought processes of various Brexiteers who voted “Leave” in the first place because they didn’t want to have to abide by all those pesky EU rules and regulations, and now seem to expect the EU to waive for them the very same pesky rules and regulations that they complained about having to abide by, are unfathomable.
Buddy, if you threw a big tantrum about having to follow the rules of our club and said you didn’t want to belong to the club anymore and walked out, the rest of us in the club are not going to just take your word for it that you’re really complying with the rules anyway because you’ve got “first world standards”.
I mean, just to be clear, it’s not like the cops don’t know about these tricks; there are a lot more “traffic cops” in Germany near the NL border, and they will want to search your car. It’s not technically a border patrol of any kind, it’s just ramped-up police presence because they know why people tend to go to Amsterdam.
Actually, that’s not quite true. Last decade I was taking a TGV from Amsterdam to Charles de Gaulle Airport. At the top of the escalator from the train to the terminal, there was a small police detachment with a sniffer dog. My concealment precautions were insufficient, unfortunately.
This is pretty much spot on, though. After the confiscation and strip search (!), I signed some form and agreed not to try any future hijinks in France. The cops escorted me to the ATM, I paid my €200 fine, and I didn’t even miss my flight back to Ireland. They were very professional and courteous about the whole thing.
Not just your car. On another later venture, I was traveling by train from Amsterdam to Düsseldorf. Shortly after clearing the German border, a couple cops (no dogs this time) came aboard and gave everyone and their luggage the stink-eye. My preparations were sufficient that time to avoid any complications.
On-topic: This Brexit debacle is just a complete shitshow. I’m still hopeful my British cousins and/or their elected representatives come to their collective senses in time before proceeding with this self-inflicted injury. We here in Ireland are especially sensitive to this issue, seeing as how any talk of a hard border post-Brexit brings with it reasonable fears of a resumption in sectarian violence, in addition to any economic downsides.
The Brexit fiasco has arisen from the use of the referendum to resolve a complex question relating to immigration, sovereignty, foreign policy, international trade and constitution that has been reduced to a simple question put to the voters. EU in or out?
Moreover the referendum has been promoted as a political imperative that represented the ‘will of the British people’. That positions it as assuming a constitutional power that it does not legally possess.
Other countries have referendums are an important part of their constitutional process. There is no such tradition in British politics. Referendums in the UK are rare and in this case was used as a political device. The UK electorate did not have the sort of year long debate and organised national conversation that took place in Scotland. We don’t have to go far to see how referendums should be done properly. Ireland has been through a phase of constitutional change that has used referendums to pose important questions to the electorate. They had a national debate with a lot of preparation and the questions were clear moral questions.
That did not happen in the UK. The Brexit vote was run like a general election campaign. A few weeks of campaigning full of political stunts and rhetorical speeches. All kinds of issues were thrown into the Brexit basket.
There is evidence the funding rules for the political campaigns were broken and that there were social media campaigns financed by foreign powers.
It was a mess.
The result has been a political and constitutional imbroglio that has saddled the current and any subsequent government with huge pressure to deliver the abandonment of forty years of EU trade treaties and the requirement to replace them with something similar that does not disrupt trade networks and supply chains. That considerably disruptive task will take a decade or more and its economic benefits are questionable. There is no great fortune to be made out of this and some very dangerous money pits.
Tearing stuff up is the easy bit. Building stuff takes a lot of time and hard work. I do hope that UK politicians will take a more serious attitude towards referendums in future. Not just as a short cut for the Prime Minister to get party hacks off your back when you have a small majority.
Other nations should take note of this example of what not to do.
:smack:
So you’re saying food and product safety, and the environment is regulated entirely by the states in the US? There are no federal rules on food additives or which chemicals you can spray on the fields? Nor on cars or furniture or children’s toys?
More to the point, the EU regulates once, rather than each individual of the 28 Member States doing so. The EU might have more regulations than the US (unproven) but it’s still far more business-friendly than having 28 individual countries, possibly regulation-light, but enormously divergent on those remaining regulations.
Can someone explain briefly what the ‘backstop’ means, and why it’s bad? I get that it is something to do with not wanting a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland (that part makes perfect sense).
What do the Brexiters want to do about free movement? I know they don’t like it, but what do they want to replace it? What would the no-deal position be?
As I understand it, the ‘backstop’ is basically an agreement that, absent another agreement, there won’t be a hard border between Northern Ireland (part of the UK) and the Republic of Ireland (in the EU). As there were agreements predating the EU in place to not have a hard border there, and much of the border is privately owned, splitting streets in two and even going through buildings, it’d be an utter nightmare to institute any kind of border control at this point.
The problems varying people have with it is it means one of 2 things:
Having an open border there but not for the rest of the UK means a de facto border between NI and the rest of the UK. Currently you can travel on the ferry with an ID like a driving licence, and they often don’t bother checking that. Which, given the history of the region, would basically be poking a heavily armed ant hill with a stick.
It would quite possibly eventually lead to NI leaving the UK and uniting with Ireland, but probably via a hell of a lot of trouble (and deaths).
Unless…
2) They don’t do that and have neither a border between NI and RoI nor one between NI and the rest of the UK, which basically means the UK stays in the customs union, has to stick to EU rules, and can’t really control immigration as people and goods can legally enter via Ireland.
Those who chant stuff like ‘Brexit means brexit!!!’ consider this unacceptable, as it’s obviously a pony with an ice-cream cone stuck to its head, and not the unicorn they demanded.
And, lastly, there was no agreed limit to how long the backstop would be in effect for, and the UK brexiteers want a unilateral right to pull out. The EU (quite reasonably IMO) has pointed out that an emergency backstop that one side can drop unilaterally is pretty much useless, and say no.
As to what the ‘no deal’ situation on immigration would be, it appears to be pretty much what the magic 8-ball says today.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to hide under the duvet and cry for a bit.
