Mexican ranchers struggle to adapt as a tiny parasite ravages their
cattle exports to the US
[August 05, 2025] By
FERNANDO LLANO and FABIOLA SÁNCHEZ
HERMOSILLO, Mexico (AP) — The United States’ suspension of live cattle
imports from Mexico hit at the worst possible time for rancher Martín
Ibarra Vargas, who after two years of severe drought had hoped to put
his family on better footing selling his calves across the northern
border.
Like his father and grandfather before him, Ibarra Vargas has raised
cattle on the parched soil of Sonora, the state in northwestern Mexico
that shares a long border with the United States, particularly Arizona.
His family has faced punishing droughts before but has never before had
to contend with the economic hit of a new scourge: the New World
Screwworm, a flesh-eating parasite.
U.S. agriculture officials halted live cattle crossing the border in
July – the third suspension of the past eight months — due to concerns
about the flesh-eating maggot which has been found in southern Mexico
and is creeping north.
The screwworm is a larva of the Cochliomyia hominivorax fly that can
invade the tissues of any warm-blooded animal, including humans. The
parasite enters animals’ skin, causing severe damage and lesions that
can be fatal. Infected animals are a serious threat to herds.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture calls it a "devastating pest" and
said in June that it poses a threat to “our livestock industry, our
economy, and our food supply chain.” It has embarked on other steps to
keep it out of the United States, which eradicated it decades ago.
As part of its strategy the U.S. is preparing to breed billions of
sterile flies and release them in Mexico and southern Texas. The aim is
for the sterile males to mate with females in the wild who then produce
no offspring.
The U.S. ban on live cattle also applies to horses and bison imports. It
hit a ranching sector already weakened by drought and specifically a
cattle export business that generated $1.2 billion for Mexico last year.
This year, Mexican ranchers have exported fewer than 200,000 head of
cattle, which is less than half what they historically send in the same
period.
For Ibarra Vargas, considered a comparatively small rancher by Sonora’s
beef-centric standards, the inability to send his calves across the
border has made him rethink everything.
The repeated bans on Mexican cows by U.S. authorities has pushed his
family to branch into beekeeping, raising sheep and selling cow's milk.
What he earns is just a fraction of what he earned by exporting live
cattle, but he is trying to hold on through the lean times.
“Tiempos de vacas flacas" — times of the lean cows — as he calls them.
“At least it lets us continue” ranching, the 57-year-old said with a
white cowboy hat perched on his head.
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Martín Ibarra Vargas points to his corrals at his small ranch in
Hermosillo, Sonora state, Tuesday, July 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Fernando
Llano)
 Reinvent to survive
Even as ranchers in Sonora intensify their efforts to make sure the
parasitic fly never makes it into their state, they’ve had to seek
new markets.
In the past two months, they’ve sold more than 35,000 mature cows
within Mexico at a significant loss.
“We couldn’t wait any longer,” said Juan Carlos Ochoa, president of
the Sonora Regional Cattle Union. Those sales, he said, came at a
“35% lower price difference compared with the export value of a
cow.”
That’s hard to stomach when beef prices in the U.S. are rising.
The U.S. first suspended cattle imports last November. Since then,
more than 2,258 cases of screwworm have been identified in Mexico.
Treatment requires a mix of manually removing the maggots, healing
the lesions on the cows and using anti-parasite medicine.
Some ranchers have also started retail beef sales through luxury
butcher shops referred to as “meat boutiques."
There are other foreign markets, for example Japan, but selling
vacuum sealed steaks across the Pacific is a dramatically different
business than driving calves to U.S. feedlots. The switch is not
easy.
An uncertain future
With his calves mooing as they ran from one end of a small corral to
the other waiting to be fed, Ibarra Vargas said he still hasn’t
figured out how he will survive an extended period of not being able
to send them to the U.S.
The recent two-year drought reduced his cattle stocks and forced him
to take on debt to save the small family ranch that has survived for
three generations.
Juan Carlos Anaya, director of Agricultural Markets Consulting
Group, attributed a 2% drop in Mexico’s cattle inventory last year
to the drought.
Anaya said Mexican ranchers who export are trying to get the U.S. to
separate what happens in southern Mexico from the cattle exporting
states in the north where stricter health and sanitation measures
are taken, “but the damage is already done.”
“We’re running out of time,” said Ibarra Vargas, who already laments
that his children are not interested in carrying on the family
business. For a rancher who “doesn’t have a market or money to
continue feeding his calves, it’s a question of time before he says:
‘you know what, this is as far as I go.’”
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Sánchez reported from Mexico City.
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