British High Commissioner to South Africa Nigel Casey says he is currently “very seized” with ensuring that measures are put in place “timeously” to guarantee no interruption in the trade relationship between the UK and South Africa when Britain leaves the European Union (EU) on March 29, 2019.

Speaking at a British Chamber of Business in Southern Africa function this week, Casey, who took up the position in April, described the trade relationship as “balanced and increasingly symbiotic” in nature. Yearly trade between South Africa and the UK stood at around £10-billion which was also significantly larger that Britain’s yearly trade flows with other key emerging markets such as Brazil and Indonesia.

Formal Brexit negotiations between the UK and the European Commission began on June 19, after British Prime Minister Theresa May formally triggered, on March 29, Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon and set in motion the two-year process for Britain’s unilateral exit from the EU.

Casey concurred with a Southern African Customs Union (Sacu) proposal that the immediate post-Brexit relationship be based on the prevailing Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), which was ratified by the EU and six Southern African countries only last year. Besides the five Sacu members of Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Swaziland and South Africa, Mozambique is also a signatory to the agreement.

The EPA, which took more than ten years to negotiate, has improved South Africa’s access to the EU on certain agricultural products in return for recognition of geographical indications on a range of European foodstuffs, wines and spirits. The deal was signed in Kasane, Botswana, in June 2016 and ratified by all participants in November last year.

“Having invested a lot of time and effort, with the EU, in making the EPA a reality, we are not about to let it fall away. So we are very seized, as is the South African Department of Trade and Industry, in making sure that we don’t allow any gap in the coverage of that agreement,” Casey said.

Sacu wrote a letter to the UK government in April formally requesting the initiation of talks based on the EPA in order to expedite the negotiations and ensure certainty well ahead of 2019.

However, South Africa’s Trade and Industry Minister Dr Rob Davies has also indicated that there would indeed need to be some level of negotiation, particularly in relation to the tariff-rate quotas on products such as wine, sugar and fruit entering the EU and the UK.

Casey said the likely course, which still had to be confirmed, was to "transpose" that EPA agreement to the bilateral relationship that will prevail from the end of March 2019 onwards.

“We are very conscious of the time constraints, we are also very conscious that we can’t just speak to South Africa, because it's a multilateral agreement, so we have to talk to all the other Southern African partners – and we will.”

However, the talks would most probably be treated as a “technical exercise” so as not to “overburden” them by any attempt at renegotiating the substance.

“In any case, as a legal fact, we are not allowed to negotiate trade agreements while we are still a member of the EU, which will be in place until March 2019. However, if that’s the route we go down hopefully it will be a relatively technical exercise and one that’s achieved in a timely way so that there is not interruption to the coverage”.

Casey noted, though, that the EPA only dealt with trade in goods and that there was potential to, at a later stage, discuss the possibility of including services, which form a large part of both the UK and the South African economies.

The UK government would take its lead, however, from its consultations with business as to whether a government-to-government agreement on services would ease constraints, or whether sector-specific agreements with South Africa might, instead, be preferable.