Ireland’s farmers have become Brexit’s first victims: the pound has sunk and is hauling down the livelihood of thousands of Irish farmers with it. Seated at her farmhouse kitchen table, Lavinia Walsh frowned over a payment ledger that sums up the grim fate of the Irish mushroom industry.
“The night before Brexit, I thought ‘This will be fine, they’re not going to do it.’ And they did. I couldn’t believe it,” said Walsh, 54, nursing a cup of tea on the farm where she lives with her two children and husband Donal. “It has developed into a catastrophe. It is a catastrophe for us.”
Five Irish mushroom farms have gone out of business since the June 23 vote. More are expected to follow by Christmas. Like many Irish mushroom farmers, the Walshes sell their entire crop to the British market for prices fixed months in advance in sterling. The currency’s 15 percent drop against the euro since the Brexit referendum has wiped out their operating margin and tipped the sector into a crisis that could spell trouble for all exporters to the U.K. The Irish are not alone. Because the U.K. imports almost half of its food, the impact is widely felt.
Sterling’s plunge is “affecting all the growers in Spain,” the U.K.’s biggest supplier of fruit and vegetables, according to Jorge Brotons of exporters association Fepex. The Netherlands, the next-largest supplier of vegetables to the U.K., has set up a dedicated Brexit information desk to help companies concerned about the fallout. A survey of British retailers by Barclays found that 43 percent expected to reduce the number of products they source from the rest of Europe. But nowhere is as exposed as Ireland. The country is the U.K.’s single biggest supplier of food and drink, an industry that provides about one in 12 Irish jobs. The U.K. buys 80 percent of the entire Irish mushroom crop.
Donal McCarthy, head of mushroom producers’ organization CMP, said that 10 percent of the Irish mushroom industry could disappear in the next few months.
“The industry is in free fall,” McCarthy said. “We need help and we need it now, because we’re bleeding.”
The size of the mushroom industry, which employs about 3,500 people and is worth roughly €180 million a year, may make it only a speck in the context of Ireland’s €26 billion agri-food industry, but its fate is ominous for bigger sectors.
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