EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins was in Mexico on Monday to review that country’s progress toward the eradication of the New World screwworm pest.
She met with her Mexican counterpart Julio Berdegue Sacristan and both later participated in a meeting with President Claudia Sheinbaum, the Mexican Foreign Ministry said.
“In a cordial, respectful and productive meeting, they reviewed progress in technical and commercial cooperation in the agricultural sector as well as other matters of mutual interest,” the ministry said in a statement obtained by Border Report. “The Mexican government emphasized the priority to reopen the border to livestock exports. Both delegations reaffirmed the importance of keeping channels of communication open at the highest levels.”
In her Tuesday morning news conference broadcast on social media, Sheinbaum said the bottom line is that Rollins was pleased with Mexico’s progress but that the U.S. border will remain closed to Mexican livestock for now.
“There is no date yet (for a reopening of the border) but she left convinced we are doing all that is needed to prevent the screwworm from reaching the border,” Sheinbaum said. “She is aware a closed border affects (the United States), too, including the price of meat, which is going up.”
The New World screwworm makes livestock sick and can, in some cases, affect humans. It transmitted by female screwworm flies that deposit their eggs in the open wounds of an animal. Once the eggs hatch, larvae burrow deep into the host’s living tissue.
Mexico for the most part has kept sick animals in southern Mexico, but a few cases have been documented a few hundred miles from the U.S. border. Its principal strategy has been containment, but that country is also building a sterile fly production facility in the southern state of Chiapas.
The plan is to release 100 million sterile flies per week to mate with fertile flies and thus prevent them from reproducing.
“We have 30 percent of this factory for the sterile flies complete. It will be ready, we hope, by mid-next year. But we are in agreement we should open the border before that,” Sheinbaum said.
Border Report reached out to Rollins’ office for comment on Tuesday and is awaiting a response.
Mexico is aware the reopening of the border depends on a Trump administration decision, but Sheinbaum said she hopes such decision is based on facts.
“What are we asking for? We want less subjectivity. They opened the border a few months ago and three days later they closed it because an animal got sick in Veracruz,” Sheinbaum said. “What we want is a series of technical markers; we close the border or not based on these indicators. There is a will from both governments to open the border as soon as we can.”
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