Thread by @Jim_Cornelius

I want to talk about nuts in the @Telegraph and Brazil, where the nuts come from, or so we've been told.

You see @JournalistJosh1 in the Telegraph published an interactive tool yesterday (telegraph.co.uk/news/0/free-cu…) supposedly showing the benefits of not being in the Customs Union.

The theory presumably is that we'll start importing from countries with the biggest market share once 'unshackled' from the Customs Union.

There's a little graphic on it showing Brazil with a 52% share of the brazil nut market. The tool allows you to examine this more closely.

So when you do this you get this. Again 52%. According to this graphic, the UK import all of its Brazil nuts from the EU (note the 0%) Really? Can this be right?

The article indicates that the source is Comtrade data from 2017. So what does that say?

There are three six-digit Harmonised System codes for brazil nuts 080121 (in shell), 080122 (unshelled), 080120 (unshelled or in shell).

When you extract from comtrade.un.org/Data/ on exports for 2017 you can see that Brazil's share of the world market is nothing like 52%

Compiling the data and summing the value from each HS code shows that it's actually Bolivia with a 52% share of the global market, not Brazil.

But here's the really interesting thing - the UK has a larger market share, by value than Brazil!

This 2016 report into the UK brazil nut uses the ITC database (which sources from Comtrade, Eurostat and others). It's from the @CBI_NL not to be confused with I @CBItweets.

cbi.eu/sites/default/…

It shows that the UK imports mainly (80%) from Bolivia, and then re-exports those nut to all over Europe. Re-exports of Brazil nuts from the UK
in 2015 amounted to 984 tonnes or €8 million and we do this freely without rules of origin checks because we are in the Customs Union.