On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced the suspension of live cattle, horse, and bison imports through U.S. ports of entry along the southern border due to the continued and rapid northward spread of New World Screwworm (NWS) in Mexico.
Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster, Ron Hays, spoke with Senior Vice President of Government Affairs at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, Ethan Lane, about border closure and its impact on the cattle industry.
NWS has been recently detected in remote farms with minimal cattle movement as far north as Oaxaca and Veracruz, about 700 miles away from the U.S. border. “That was the last, real, logical point, width-wise on the peninsula of Mexico to really mount a defense, given the amount of sterile flies we have to work with each week – about a hundred million,” Lane said.
Despite the efforts of the United States and Mexico, and the economic impact on both countries, there has been continued northward advancement of NWS, and additional action must be taken to slow the progression of this deadly parasitic fly.
“This is a continuation of that on-again, off-again dynamic we’ve seen with Mexico relating to the New World Screwworm and its incursion into Southern Mexico over the past few months,” Lane said. “We’ve been talking for weeks about that effort to stop the spread of screwworm using that sterile fly technique that requires dozens of overflights per week over that hot zone in Central Mexico.”
It is an involved process to get the flies from the breeding facility in Panama, fly them to Mexico, then land them and stage them. Several planes must land across the area and then be refueled before making their return trips.
“This really is a time for us to be looking at those controls in Mexico and what we have going on at our own border and continuing to engage with Congress to illustrate to them how pressing this issue is,” Lane said. “As part of the ongoing budget and funding discussions in D.C., we need to make sure they’re thinking about the fact that this is going to be an expensive fix and even more expensive if we end up with New World Screwworm here in the United States.”
He insisted upon the importance of ramping up sterile fly production in the U.S. to mount a defense against the parasitic flies and push them back into Central America, which he estimates to cost several hundred million dollars.
Lane understands how badly the U.S. cattle industry needs cattle from Mexico, but also that Secretary Rollins made the right decision. “The secretary deserves a lot of credit for taking decisive actions; it’s never an easy decision to make,” he said. “We have a lot of cattle feeders, and others, that are really in need of those cattle coming up from Mexico right now, and we appreciate that they are taking an approach to this at the USDA of continuing to monitor and check in. We believe there will be some off-ramps down the line if we see some benchmarks hit by the Mexicans as far as arresting the spread of this through Mexico.”
The import suspension will persist on a month-by-month basis, until a significant window of containment is achieved, but any livestock currently in holding for entry into the United States will be processed normally; This includes an APHIS port Veterinary Medical Officer inspection exam and treatment to ensure they are not carrying NWS.
The Beef Buzz is a regular feature heard on radio stations around the region on the Radio Oklahoma Ag Network and is a regular audio feature found on this website as well. Click on the LISTEN BAR at the top of the story for today’s show and check out our archives for older Beef Buzz shows covering the gamut of the beef cattle industry today.
