Trading with Mexico

Government officials in Mexico plan to introduce legislation that would stop corn imports from the United States. I asked Dr. Jaya Jha, professor of economics at Colby College what the impact behind this potential move would be. "Mexico's proposal is that it is going to seek different suppliers, mainly Argentina and Brazil and I think Mexico has a lot to lose from this. They need to tread carefully. I read a statistic that said Mexico purchased $2.4 billion worth of corn from the United States in 2015 which is really up from an estimated $390 million when NAFTA was put into place in 1995. My guess is that they purchased a lot more in 2016. I prefer to talk in terms of metric tons. In 2011 Mexico imported about 8.6 million tons of US corn, in 2015 it imported about 11.8 million tons and in 2016 it imported 30.9 million tons of US corn. Mexico imported about 21% of US corn in 2014 and about 25% of US corn in 2016. Those percentages are all relating to the total amount of US corn that was exported.