EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – The three U.S. House members from New Mexico are calling on the Trump administration to halt plans to dramatically increase beef imports from Argentina.
In a letter to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollings and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, Democratic U.S. Reps. Teresa Leger Fernandez, Melanie Stansbury and Gabe Vasquez said stepped up beef imports will hurt New Mexico ranchers.
“This plan to flood the market with foreign beef will take money out of the pockets of New Mexico’s ranchers with questionable benefits to consumers,” the lawmakers said in a statement on Tuesday. “Selling out New Mexico’s ranchers is not the way to bring down beef prices at the grocery store.”
Late last month, the Trump administration said it planned to increase beef imports from Argentina – which is led by conservative Trump ally Javier Milei – by 300 percent or up to 80,000 metric tons.
The move comes as U.S. ranchers deal with drought and increased production costs and consumers see retail prices go up amid tariffs on Brazilian beef and a ban on Mexican livestock due to concerns over New World screwworm contamination.
“From years of drought to soaring input costs, New Mexico’s ranchers have barely turned a profit. Just as ranchers expected a good year, the Trump administration recklessly announced a plan to increase cheap imports of Argentinian beef,” the New Mexico lawmakers said in the letter.
Earlier, the Missouri-based group Farm Action called the stepped-up Argentinian beef imports a “betrayal to the American rancher” and said Trump was acting “more like the president of Argentina than the president of the United States.”
Trump has called on American beef producers to cooperate.
“The cattle ranchers, who I love, don’t understand that the only reason they are doing so well, for the first time in decades, is because I put tariffs on cattle coming into the U.S., including a 50 percent tariff on Brazil,” he posted on Truth social.
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