The suspension of living cattle from Mexico by the United States scored in the worst time for Rancher Martín Ibarra Vargas, who had hoped to bring his family on a better foot to sell his calves across the northern border.
Like his father and grandfather in front of him, Ibarra Varga’s cattle collected cattle on the dried up soil of Sonora, the state in northwestern Mexico, on a long border with the United States, especially Arizona. His family had previously punished droughts, but never had to deal with the economic hit of a new scourge: the new globe worm, a carnivorous parasite.
US agricultural officers Stopped live cattle, which crossed the border in July -The third suspension of the last eight months of concerns about concerns about the carnivorous maggot that has been found in southern Mexico And crawl north.
The screw worm is a larva of the Cochliomyia Hominebrorax fly that can penetrate the tissue of a warm-flowered animal, including people. The parasite occurs in the skin of the animals and causes serious damage and lesions that can be fatal. Infected animals are a serious threat to herds.
The US Agriculture Ministry calls it a “devastating pest” and said in June that it is a threat to “our cattle industry, our economy and our food supply chain”. There have been other steps to keep it out of the United States, which it exterminated decades ago.
The USA is preparing as part of its strategy Billions of sterile fly breeding And leave them free in Mexico and South Texas. The goal For the sterile men to mate with women in the wild, who then do not produce offspring.
The US ban on living cattle also applies to horses and bison imports. It met a ranch sector that was already weakened by drought, and in particular a cattle export business that achieved 1.2 billion US dollars for Mexico last year. This year, Mexican cattle breeders exported fewer than 200,000 cattleness, which is less than half of what they historically send in the same period.
For Ibarra Vargas, which is considered a comparatively small rancher by Sonoras beef-centered standards, the inability to send its calves across the border have everything.
The repeated prohibitions for Mexican cows of the US authorities have urged his family to branch them into beekeeping, raise sheep and sell cow’s milk. What he deserves is only a fraction of what he deserves by exporting living cattle, but he tries to capture the slim times.
“Tiempos de vacas flacas” – times of lean cows – as he calls them.
“At least it lets us go on,” said the 57-year-old with a white cowboy hat on her head.
Reinvent to survive
Even if the cattle breeders in Sonora strengthen their efforts to ensure that the parasitic fly never makes it into their state, they had to look for new markets.
In the past two months, they have sold more than 35,000 ripe cows in Mexico to a significant loss.
“We couldn’t wait any longer,” said Juan Carlos Ochoa, President of the Sonora Regional Cattle Union. These sales would have delivered a “35% lower price difference compared to the export value of a cow” with a “35% lower price difference”.
This is difficult to bear when the beef prices in the United States rise.
The United States suspended cattle imports for the first time in November. Since then, more than 2,258 cases of screw worm have been identified in Mexico. Treatment requires a mixture of manually remove the maggots, the healing of the lesions on the cows and the use of anti-parasite medicine.
Some cattle breeders have also started with luxury butcher shops in retail with beef sales, which are called “meat boutiques”.
There are other foreign markets, for example Japan, but the sale of vacuum sealed steaks throughout the Pacific is a dramatic business than calves to US feedlots. The switch is not easy.
An uncertain future
With his calves, when she ran to feed from one end of a small corrals to the other, Ibarra Vargas said that he still has not found out how he would survive for a long time in which he cannot send them to the USA
The youngest two -year drought reduced his cattle and forced him to take over debt to save the small family ranch that has survived for three generations.
Juan Carlos Anaya, director of the advisory group for agricultural markets, attributed a decline in the cattle inventory in Mexico to 2% last year.
Anaya said that Mexican cattle breeders who export, try to get the United States to separate what happens in southern Mexico, from the cattle export states in the north, in which stricter measures for health and hygiene are taken, “but the damage has already been done”.
“We no longer have time,” said Ibarra Vargas, who has already complained that his children are not interested in operating the family company. For a rancher who “has no market or money to continue to feed his calves, it is a matter of time until he says: ‘You know what I go as far as I go.’
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Sánchez reported from Mexico city.
