Last week, we saw a glimpse of Britain’s present and future. First, a “reset” with the European Union, touted by London as a step to lower barriers and increase trade in similar food and fresh produce between neighbours. Second, a Ugandan plane flying direct to the UK for the first time in more than two decades, carrying a cargo of produce that Britain cannot grow.
It is not for the leader of a country far away to judge the rights or wrongs of closer trade cooperation between Britain and Europe. But what is undeniable in 2025 is that the oft-quoted “first rule of trade” – that proximity matters – is a fiction. If it were true then the proportion of trade the UK conducts with the rest of the world would not have accelerated for the last 20 years, while in parallel trade with its continental neighbours declined.
It is a fact that many nations around the world proudly possess older and deeper ties to Britain of shared language, culture, and trade. Many, like my own country Uganda, are members of the Commonwealth, and have sought to re-kindle brotherly relations since Brexit in 2020.
The fruits of this opportunity are increasingly visible: trade deals have been signed with Australia, New Zealand, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), and India. This shows just how many seek to recalibrate the old bonds that predate Britain’s time in the EU, and how regardless of any reset with your neighbours your country’s trade relations are now permanently global.
That’s why the landing of Uganda airlines flight UR110 at Gatwick last week represents such potential. There is simply no reason in today’s world why Britain should not seek to increase trade with every continent – and not least Africa when it contains 11 of the world’s twenty fastest-growing economies.
In the UK – and her continental neighbours – green beans cannot be grown beyond the summer. Coffee beans cannot be grown at all. In Uganda, both – and more – can be harvested all year around. When much of what you and your neighbours grow is similar, and according to the same seasonal rotations, that makes them as much trading competitors as partners. Uganda, on the other hand, is complementary.
But we are ahead of ourselves. There are many barriers to trade between Britain and Africa and they will not be lowered by the first planeload of coffee, chocolate, and chillis on flight UR110. Those will be lowered by trade agreements that reduce tariffs, by addressing non-tariff barriers to trade and, just as importantly, by challenging prejudices about Africa – prejudices Africans too must work hard to combat.
In 2023 the UK launched the Developing Countries’ Trading Scheme, a post-Brexit trade policy that reduced – in many cases to zero – tariffs on a raft of products for 65 emerging market nations with more than half from Africa.
This major statement of belief in free trade and reengagement with the world was welcome. Yet lowering a tariff on, for example fresh produce, does not automatically mean a single extra pea or mango will be imported. The most devastating barrier facing African farmers – indeed most worldwide – are the non-tariff barriers put in place in the name of food standards.
Everyone wants safe and clean food, and who has not tasted the best when it is grown naturally, in a garden, smallholding, or allotment? Yet such produce would not be legally permitted for sale in a single British supermarket under a constellation of rules and regulations slated to both protect and seemingly at the same time to remove all taste.
Extreme certification and regulatory barriers are destined to benefit huge commercial agribusinesses that can afford to meet them, while they wreck the chances of smaller producers through prohibitive costs from exporting to the UK. This is a system that empowers not people but multinationals.
There must be a solution between friendly nations that with sufficient imagination can land a happy medium. That same approach should be turned to address preconceptions about Africa and its expectations of relations with Britain.
Too many in the West believe Africans want their charity, and their money. They are wrong on the first, but right on the second. We do not want your aid; we want your trade. We want the honesty of being trading partners, not the dependency of handouts.
Help yourselves by helping us supply you with the food and goods you cannot produce. Sell to us the services and goods we cannot make. Manufacture and assemble with us and bring in technology and we give you the raw materials. This is what the future of trade looks like. Britain can make the first planeload of Ugandan produce in two decades not a footnote in its new global trade relations, but the reawakening of something older and more complementary than we have known for a long time.
Yoweri Museveni is president of Uganda
A plane from Africa can fly Britain to its global future
Uganda does not need aid to prosper; it needs to trade with the United Kingdom. That will benefit both sides