A panorama that doesn’t look good at all, really
It seems that for Mexican livestock exporters, the American dream became a bureaucratic and health nightmare of the kind that keeps you up at night. The brake on shipments of live cattle to the United States, that finicky neighbor with whom we share a border, not only has not been lifted, but threatens to extend until 2026. Yes, you read that correctly: 2026. As if we were in a bad relationship where they ghost you for years.
Juan Antonio Hinojosa, a risk management consultant at Stonex Financial who has surely seen better scenarios, dropped the bombshell. According to the most recent projections from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Mexican exports for this year will plummet to around 240 thousand units. And the worst? For 2026, the projection iszero . Zero. Nothing. An absolute rounding off that hurts more than a blow to the ego.
“They don’t see us sending cattle to the United States in 2026,” said the specialist, with a frankness that cuts like a knife. Basically, the USDA has put us on an extended timeout, and it doesn’t look like we’ll be getting out anytime soon.
The worm that ate hope (and exports)
The villain of this film is the screwworm, a little bug that sounds like a plague from a B-series horror movie. Eradicating it from Mexico, according to Jorge Esteve Recolons, president of the National Agricultural Council (CNA), is not a matter of a few days. We are talking about a problem that could take years to solve. Years in which uncertainty will run rampant across the ranches in the north of the country.
The most ironic thing about the matter is the geography of all this chaos. The outbreaks of this very annoying worm are concentrated in the Mexican southeast, a mythical 1,400 kilometers from the northern states, which are exactly the ones that carry out exports. It’s as if they forbid you, who live in CDMX, to go out because there was a flu outbreak in Cancun. Logic is conspicuous by its absence.
This is where things get juicier and where our cynical millennial side awakens. Esteve Recolons suggests that, although the closure responds to a legitimate health measure (because the worm is a real problem), it also smacks of textbook political pressure. A move where American politicians on the border can kill two birds with one stone: be tough on health issues and scratch some points in local popularity. A two-for-one special, but in a geopolitical and quite annoying version.
Meanwhile, high-level negotiations move forward with the speed of a bureaucratic procedure. This week, USDA personnel landed in Chihuahua to verify quarantine stations. Sounds good, right? One step forward. But the results of that verification will be released “eventually.” And “eventually” in international relations lexicon can mean anything but “soon.”
Not everything is bad news. There is a small ray of hope in this sea of pessimism. According to the latest data from Sader, the number of reported cases of the worm has plummeted. From about 120 cases per day when this drama began in November, today there are about 30. The effort to control the plague is giving results, even if slowly. But, of course, apparently for the American authorities that is still not enough.
The urgency among Mexican producers is palpable. Their war cry is clear: that the United States adhere to the regionalization agreements. Basically, they understand that a problem at one end of the country should not close the doors for the entire territory. It’s common sense, a concept that sometimes seems to be in danger of extinction in the field of trade policy.
While the Secretary of Agriculture, Julio Berdegué, tries to coordinate visits to “leave the Americans alone” (a task that sounds as exhausting as trying to reason on Twitter), Mexican ranchers wait. They wait with a patience that deserves all the memes, seeing how their economic livelihood hangs by a thread negotiated on distant desks.
In the end, this prolonged closure is a brutal reminder of how fragile economic dependence on a single market can be. A drama with all the ingredients: a villain (the worm), a seemingly insurmountable obstacle (bureaucracy and politics), and an uncertain future. A complete season of a series that no one asked for, but that we have to see.
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