Mexico: Avocado producers opposing the FTA with Peru and Brazil
Cambiodemichocan | 2 February 2011
Mexico: Avocado producers opposing the FTA with Peru and Brazil
Due to the risk to cultivation health that it represents, producers and packagers who export the Michoacán avocado oppose this fruit being included in the free trade agreements which Mexico will sign with Peru and Brazil.
When signed, these agreements will bring 1,200 products in to the country that will shake the national economy and represent health threats to other Mexican agricultural products.
To avoid what could be an agricultural catastrophe, they’re asking for the Republic’s Senate to intervene and eliminate the chance of avocados from those countries getting in to the national territory like the other products.
Although, "at this moment, the Economy Secretary, with all the impertinence and arrogance, tells us that all the 1,200 products are going, even the ones that were previously excluded", in the words of the vice-president of External Commerce of the National Council for Agriculture and Livestock (CNA), Benjamín Grayeb Ruíz. In a interview to "Cambio de Michoacán", denied that his refusal in including the avocado in the agreements is a protectionist attitude, but more an action to face the danger of exotic plagues contaminating the national cultivations.
Looming danger
"Is not that we are protectionists and don’t want competition, since we have it from all over the world, from the agricultural sharks. California is one of the main fruit and vegetables exporters in the world. The 8th economy in the world. As for Chile, it is one of the main food exporters, mainly fruits and vegetables", said Grayeb Ruíz, putting aside that Mexican producers and exporters of avocado are afraid, since "we are used to competing in any part of the world".
Although he underlined that there’s the risk that avocado from Peru and Brazil is commercialized in the Mexican market: "Those countries have no health control. They have a plague that could be deadly to us, the Mediterranean fly, which affects avocado, but they also have livestock plagues like the foot-and-mouth disease".
He said that facing a possible contamination with the fly in the country, the avocado producers, the only ones in the country who export, "would loose our health status. It has taken us 86 years to open the North-American market. Is it worth the risk? According to the exported amounts, this is one of the main products that generates foreign currency in the country".
The battle
He explained what is being done by CNA and reminded that " it is responsibility of the federal executive to sign the free trade agreements, but they have to be ratified by the Senate".
"The saddest thing is that we worked for 6 years on this and in the beginning we revised the list of products coming from Peru and Mexico. We didn’t opposed to a treaty with Peru, only asked for exclusions due to health reasons or social reasons".
He reminded that when the Free Trade Agreement with North America was signed there were exclusions and the market didn’t open for the Mexican avocado.
The last hope is in the Senate’s decision, since it has to ratify such agreements: "There are 120 senators and we, as a council, are working so they don’t let it pass", the way they are presented by the Secretary of Economy.
