Tom Haward works at his oyster farm on Mersea Island in Essex, England. Photo / Emli Bendixen, the New York Times
A decade ago, Tom Haward and his late father, Richard, began crafting a plan to expand their family’s oyster business.
For two-and-a-half centuries, the Hawards have cultivated oysters on Mersea Island on the east coast of England.
They used to sail their molluscs up the River Thames to London.
The latest generations wanted to go farther afield, to sell half their oysters to mainland Europe.
The European market was alluring. For an island nation, Britain does not eat much fish and shellfish, and Haward and his father believed Europe would provide a “consistent market”.
But those European expansion plans were torpedoed by Britain’s decision to leave the European Union. Seven years ago, Haward said goodbye to the few continental customers he had and focused on selling his oysters at home.
Now, thanks to a new trade agreement Britain has signed with the EU, Haward hopes to revive those old ambitions.
“I do feel quite optimistic that something really lucrative could happen with Europe again,” he said, standing in his shed on the coast.
“If it’s done right – basically resetting everything back to the way it used to be for shellfish movements – there’s nothing stopping us creating a great relationship with Europeans again.”
Shellfish farmers – and other food and drink exporters in Britain – are set to be some of the biggest winners from the country’s updated trade deal with the EU, which was announced last month.
When it is implemented, the pact would remove some of the bureaucratic barriers that caused British food and drink exports to the bloc to drop by one-third over the past five years.
When Britain formally left in early 2020, its exporters, particularly small sellers of food, found sales to the bloc had become prohibitively expensive and risky.
New border checks, veterinary certificates and other paperwork piled up, which brought costs and the risk that errors could delay or derail shipments.
In some industries, rules changed overnight and effectively prohibited exports. One of the biggest casualties of this was Britain’s shellfish industry, which exported nearly 90% of what it caught.
Shellfish such as mussels and oysters that were harvested from most of Britain’s waters had to go through a special cleaning process before they could be sent to the EU.
But Europe did not want pre-cleaned shellfish, because its wholesalers cleaned their own. Britain’s shellfish producers were locked out of their most important market.
In North Wales, the mussel farming industry was “to all extents and purposes wiped out”, said David Jarrad, chief executive of the Shellfish Association of Great Britain.
The new agreement will substantially ease the health and safety checks and paperwork for food exports that have weighed down British businesses.
The vast majority of the shellfish association’s members are “delighted” by this, Jarrad said, but they are still waiting for the finer details on the changes.
It is not clear when that will happen and the rules will take effect, with some suggestions it could take up to 18 months, he added.
For now, Haward, 43, conducts his business the same way his father, grandfather and other forefathers did.
Most days, he and a small team, including his wife, Gemma, take a small, light blue boat just off the coast to dredge or hand pick oysters off the seabed.
In a hut that has been in the same spot for more than 150 years, the oysters are washed, then weighed and sorted. These days, though, he uses a conveyor belt with a laser and highly sensitive scale for sorting.
Other oyster farmers dot the coastline, several of which are also familyrun businesses.
It’s not uncommon for people on Mersea Island to trace their history back centuries. It is a tight-knit community, traditionally of fishermen, who can find themselves cut off from the rest of the country several times a day when the tide is high.
Haward might have been able to keep exporting after the initial Brexit changes because his family depurate their oysters before sale, using ultraviolet light to purify the seawater that runs over the oysters for two days.
But he decided to retreat from supplying Europe after the 2016 Brexit referendum, when negotiations dragged on and trading rules were deeply uncertain.
Now, nearly half of the one million oysters he sells each year go to London’s Borough Market, where long lines form to get freshly shucked bivalves from the Haward stand.
The rest go to the London’s Billingsgate seafood market, restaurants or mail-order customers.
Despite the Brexit hurdles, many oyster farmers in Britain have considered themselves fortunate because oysters are currently in vogue, with younger diners finding a taste for them.
Last month’s deal with the EU was the third trade pact Britain signed in just two weeks, after agreements with India and the United States, and the Government hopes to sign another deal with the Gulf soon.
As US President Donald Trump raises tariffs and disrupts global trade systems, Britain’s quick succession of deals is designed to send a clear signal to other countries that it is open to trade and will be a reliable and stable partner.
But these deals are likely to have only a limited impact on the nation’s economy.
As a trade-intensive economy, Britain is still vulnerable to the negative effects of global trade uncertainty.
And it can still be buffeted by tariffs: British exports to the US slumped by £2 billion ($4.4b) in April, after four months of increases, which also contributed to the economy contracting that month, data from the Office for National Statistics showed last week.
“These deals are not going to suddenly transform UK growth,” said Michael Gasiorek, a professor of economics at the University of Sussex.
“The UK has a number of constraints to growth, which are much more domestically focused, to do with infrastructure, skills, investment and so on. But these deals will help.”
For specific sectors, the three deals could create important opportunities.
Scotland’s whisky producers, for instance, are pleased that India will halve tariffs on their bottles. And Britain’s car and steel makers hope to sidestep high tariffs on their industries through the agreement with the US, though that has yet to take effect.
The agreement with the EU has the potential to be most significant, as Britain’s largest and closest trading partner.
Makers of sausages and burger patties are set to be able to export fresh products to the bloc again, rather than frozen. Cheese producers are hopeful that faster border crossings will help bolster business.
Saving time is critical, said David Lockwood, a director of Neal’s Yard Dairy, which sends about a third of its exports to Europe.
“If we could shave time on the number of days from border to receiving, it will make an enormous difference to us,” he said.
For some companies, the uncertainty about the execution of the EU deal and memories of the volatile Brexit negotiations have made them cautious about making plans to restart European exports.
In Whitstable, on the coast of Kent, James Green said he would remain focused on serving British customers.
Before Brexit, the Whitstable Oyster Co. exported half of the more than 2.5 million oysters to France, where buyers would often put the oysters on their own beds before selling them on. Then the rules about cleaning the oysters changed. “At the time, that was a massive hit for us.”
So he reduced production, down to about 1.5 million oysters a year, and made up the loss by selling to British wholesalers and restaurants.
He does not intend to go back to selling oysters to France at lower wholesale prices.
“It’s not like turning a tap,” Green said.
“You can’t just open the faucet and expect the trade to immediately start flowing.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Eshe Nelson
Photograph by: Emli Bendixen
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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