The UK fishing sector looks likely to suffer as part of the government’s attempts to deepen security ties with the EU, reports The Times this morning. British firms will be able to bid for the new €150 billion EU defence fund as part of PM Keir Starmer’s reset with the bloc after the UK made significant concessions to Brussels on fishing rights. France has insisted the defence pact is linked to the row over haddock, herring and cod quotas. British negotiators are understood to have accepted EU demands for a multi-year deal on fish.
It comes as chancellor Rachel Reeves is in the US for talks at the International Monetary Fund this week, where she will argue for global free trade in the face of Donald Trump’s punitive tariffs, reports The Guardian, amid continued international economic turbulence. One senior official said: “We’re facing a new economic reality, but we’re a heavily trading country, with the value of our exports the equivalent of 60% of GDP, so it’s always in our own interests to promote free trade.” Reeves will urge the Trump administration to cut punitive tariffs on UK car and steel exports and step up negotiations for a trade deal when she meets the US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, for the first time, allies said. He is seen as one of the less hardline US voices on trade.
Turmoil in the financial markets continues, with the US stock markets falling again on Monday as Donald Trump continued attacks against the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, who the US president called “a major loser” for not lowering interest rates (The Guardian).
It doesn’t get any easier for businesses in the UK either, with The Times reporting the so-called ‘Packaging Tax’ may be “catastrophic” for small food businesses. It says the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) levy has created the “hardest trading environment for food businesses” that Nadine Maggi, MD of sweet maker Sweet Freedom “has ever seen”.
Elsewhere, booze retailer Majestic has axed wines from a string of small vineyards after a shake-up of alcohol tax rates made them unprofitable, reports The Telegraph. Under new rules that came into effect in February, tax is calculated based on a wine’s individual strength – making some much more expensive “and creating a mountain of extra paperwork for retailers”.
Financial Times reports the “immense popularity of Dubai chocolate”, spurred on by TikTok, has sparked a global pistachio shortage, which has sent prices of the nut soaring. The shortage has seen prices surge. In one year, prices have risen from $7.95 to $10.30 a pound, Giles Hacking, from nut trader CG Hacking, told the Financial Times.
Steak, mashed potatoes and deserts for astronauts could soon be grown from individual cells in space if an experiment launched into orbit today is successful. The BBC reports a European Space Agency (ESA) project is assessing the viability of growing so-called lab-grown food in the low gravity and higher radiation in orbit and on other worlds.
Sales of beef dripping is apparently surging, according to The Telegraph, in response to claims over the negative health effects of seed oils – perpetuated by US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr and other MAGA supporters. Amy Moring, the founder of food startup Hunter & Gather, said the company had benefited from a 300pc increase in sales of its beef tallow – another word for dripping – since September. It is on course to sell over 40 tonnes of the ingredient this year.
Ocado has apologised “unreservedly” to Mumsnet for citing “hateful political views” when it pulled out of a commercial partnership over the parenting forum’s stance on the definition of sex in the Equality Act. The BBC reports that the forum’s founder Justine Roberts said Ocado had “abruptly pulled out” of the partnership after Mumsnet called at the last election for the act to be reformed “to ensure women can access single-sex places”. In a post on X, Ocado said the comments were “not representative of us as a company” and that they were made by a “temporary contractor” who has since left.
The Times profiled egg supplier Clarence Court over the Easter break and revealed how the business, selling “Britain’s poshest eggs” cracked the mainstream (at £3.20 a box). Despite soaring costs and avian flu, we’re eating more eggs than ever, it reports – despite ‘eggflation’ of about 20% since January.
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