Parasite ravages Mexican cattle exports to the U.S. : NPR

A calf is evaluated by a veterinarian during a veterinary inspection in Hermosillo, in the state of Sonora, Mexico.

Fernando LLANO / AP

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Fernando LLANO / AP

Hermosillo, Mexico – The suspension of the United States of living cattle imports from Mexico hit the worst time for the breeder Martín Ibarra Vargas, who, after two years of severe drought, hoped to put his family on a better base by selling his calves through the north border.

Like his father and grandfather in front of him, Ibarra Vargas raised cattle on the dry soil of Sonora, the state of northwest Mexico which shares a long border with the United States, in particular Arizona. His family must have already punished droughts, but never had to face the economic blow of a new scourge: The New World Screwworm, a flesh eater parasite.

US agricultural officials interrupted living cattle crossing the border in July – the third suspension of the last eight months – due to concerns about the flesh -eating fly that was found in southern Mexico and slips north.

The screw verge is a larva of the Cochliomyia hominivorax fly that can invade the tissues of any animal with hot blood, including humans. The parasite enters the skin of animals, causing serious damage and lesions that can be fatal. Infected animals are a serious threat to herds.

The American Department of Agriculture calls this a “devastating devastating” and said in June that it threatened “our livestock industry, our economy and our food supply chain”. He embarked on other stages to keep him outside the United States, which eradicated him decades ago.

As part of its strategy, the United States is preparing to raise billions of sterile flies and release it in Mexico and in southern Texas. The objective is that sterile men mate with wild women who then produce no offspring.

The American ban on living cattle also applies to horses and imports of bison. He struck a breeding sector already weakened by drought and in particular a cattle export company which generated $ 1.2 billion for Mexico last year. This year, Mexican breeders have exported less than 200,000 cattle heads, which represents less than half of what they historically send during the same period.

For Ibarra Vargas, considered as a relatively small breeder according to standards centered on the beef of Sonora, the inability to send his calves through the border has rethought everything.

Repeated prohibitions on Mexican cows by the American authorities prompted his family to branch into beekeeping, to raise sheep and to sell cow’s milk. What he wins is only a fraction of what he has won by exporting live cattle, but he tries to keep Lean’s times.

“Tiempos of Vaccas Flacas” – times of lean cows – as he calls them.

“At least that allows us to continue” breeding, “said the 57 -year -old man with a white cowboy hat perched on his head.

Reinvent to survive

Even if Sonora’s breeders intensify their efforts to ensure that the parasitic fly never goes to their state, they had to seek new markets.

In the past two months, they have sold more than 35,000 mature cows in Mexico with significant loss.

“We could not wait,” said Juan Carlos Ochoa, president of the Sonora Regional Cattle Union. These sales, he said, were “a price difference less than 35% compared to the export value of a cow”.

It is difficult to spread when the prices of beef in the United States increase.

The United States has suspended cattle imports for the first time last November. Since then, more than 2,258 cases of screw worm have been identified in Mexico. Treatment requires a mixture of manual elimination of maggots, healing of cows lesions and using anti-parasite medicine.

Some breeders have also launched retail beef sales in luxury butchery stores called “meat shops”.

There are other foreign markets, for example Japan, but the sale of vacuum sealed steaks across the Pacific is a company radically different from the conduct of calves to American fattening parks. The switch is not easy.

An uncertain future

With his calves which escape while they were running from one end of one small corral to the other while waiting to be nourished, Ibarra Vargas said that he had still not understood how he would survive an extended period not to be able to send them to the United States

The recent drought of two years has reduced her livestock stocks and forced her to take debts to save the small family ranch that survived for three generations.

Juan Carlos Anaya, director of the agricultural markets group, awarded a 2% drop in the Inventory of Mexico cattle last year to drought.

Anaya said that the Mexican breeders who export try to bring the United States to separate what is happening in southern Mexico from cattle exporting states in the North where stricter health and sanitation measures are taken, “but the damage is already caused”.

“We lack time,” said Ibarra Vargas, who already deplores that his children are not interested in exercising the family business. For a breeder who “has no market or money to continue feeding his calves, it’s a matter of time before he said:” You know what, it’s as far as I go. “”