British Sugar has launched a legal challenge to the UK government’s decision to allow 260,00 tonnes of tariff-free raw cane sugar to be imported into the UK.
An autonomous tariff rate quota (ATQ) of 260,000 tonnes for raw cane sugar applied from January as part of the new post-Brexit UK Global Tariff. ATQs allow imports up to a given quantity of a good to enter at a lower or zero tariff for a specified period of time.
The NFU reacted to this at the time with ‘serious concerns’, they warned that such imports were grown according to production standards that would be illegal in the UK. They said that the quota would ‘undermine thousands of UK sugar beet growers’, and ‘seriously jeopardise the viability of the home-grown crop’.