A FAMILIAR ghost returned to haunt livestock producers and governments last week. Mexico and the United States reached a deal that allows Americans to ship breeding stock dairy heifers to Mexico.
The agreement caught many off guard in the Canadian livestock industry because Mexican officials have long maintained that their country would reopen to Canada and the U.S. at the same time.
Mexico banned cattle from Canada and the U.S. in 2003, when BSE was discovered in each country .
While last week’s deal could serve as an important first step toward re-establishing continent-wide cattle trade, it runs contrary to what Canada and the U.S. once advocated: that the two cattle industries are too intertwined to be considered anything less than a single market.
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Surprisingly, Canada was excluded from the deal, not because of Mexican prohibitions, but because American regulations raised concerns in Mexico.
Mexico feared that if it accepted breeding stock from Canada, a country the U.S. has prohibitions against, it would be subject to the same restrictions as Canada and would lose access to U.S. markets for about one million feeder cattle it ships there each year.
Yet Canadian breeding stock represents no greater risk to the Mexican herd than U.S. breeding animals. As well, BSE has never been shown to be transmitted from parent to offspring.
Most analysts speculate the U.S. requires at least six months to lift its sanctions against Canadian breeding animals and cattle older than 30 months. That gives American producers at least a six month head start to re-establish dominance in the Mexican marketplace. Once buyer-seller relationships are established, it could prove difficult for Canadians to break into the market later.
Also last week, Taiwan announced it would not accept beef from the U.S. if it contained meat from Canadian cattle shipped to the U.S. for immediate slaughter. Cattle shipped from Canada and then fed in the U.S. before slaughter were are not restricted. The machinations and politics behind the international beef trade don’t always make sense.
But the lesson to learn here is vigilance. The events should serve as a wake-up call for the federal government to push BSE trade restriction issues to the top of the priority list in trade discussions with the U.S.
As well, the cattle industry must continue to press its case.
Amid the bad news, there also came a snippet of good.
In the U.S., Jay Truitt, a vice-president of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, delivered encouraging remarks on the organization’s website.
“It’s our understanding that Mexico is making full resumption of trade in breeding stock from the U.S. to Mexico contingent upon trade negotiations with Canada.”
We can only hope.
Bruce Dyck, Terry Fries, Barb Glen, D’Arce McMillan and Ken Zacharias collaborate in the writing of Western Producer editorials.
