When Mexican President Vicente Fox told farmers and farmer organizations recently in Mexico there is a serious effort to negotiate with the United States and Canada to exclude beans from complete trade liberalization in 2008, Pulse Canada officials took notice.
“We figured something like this would probably come along,” said Pulse Canada Chair, Jack Froese from his farm in Winkler, Man. “We’ve been working extremely hard, should something like this be put in place, that we get equal access with the Americans. If the Mexicans make a deal with the Americans for a certain amount, we want to at least have equal opportunity meaning the same numbers as the Americans.”
Froese isn’t sure what will happen, but this could seriously affect proposed bean exports to Mexico starting in 2008. Under NAFTA, the tariffs have been dropping every year. This next year, the beans should be trading better because the tariffs are low enough to make it worthwhile for Canadians to ship them to Mexico.
In 2005, he said the Canadian industry was walking cautiously sensing the trade with Mexico wasn’t about to open up all the way in 2008. The Mexican industry is very diverse from state of the art production in Sinaloa to subsistence farming in Durango. “If these farmers are faced with open and free trade, I don’t know if they can exist, but at the same time, they wield a lot of political power,” said Froese. How right he was. With pressure from the farmers, Mexican’s president wants that pressure on his side. Therefore, see some changes to NAFTA as it pertains to beans