Some states and other countries have put restrictions in place on taking cattle imports from Texas after the New World Screwworm crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Dr. Charles Martinez, an agricultural and resource economist with the University of Tennessee, talked about the potential impact on Texas, the biggest beef producer in the U.S.
The immediate reaction is that we know now that if we think about a location of animals, and we’ll call that a supply, so if we think of that area where the fly was – case one and two where, and then as it spread a little bit – now we know some states are not allowing any cattle from Texas to flow into their state, and Canada and Mexico have made their stances on not allowing animals that originate from Texas too. If we just think about the state of Texas and their supply, and the supply of animals that they have, and now we’re losing demand with that supply, that could have some market implications.”
It’s hard to know how much impact there’ll be in the cattle markets.
“Now, Texas is so big that some of that might not be too much of a cause of concern, or if animals are coming from, like, the far Northeast side of Texas, where it’s not so much like Tyler, Texas, and kind of more in that area, they might not be seeing too much of a disturbance in the markets. But if you’re in South Texas, and you’re used to hitting your daily or your weekly livestock auction or your local sale barn, there might be some implications right now by way of no supply, no demand, and the market just going zilch for a little bit because of this newness and this unknown-ness.”
He describes the situation as unknown, even though the U.S. has dealt with New World Screwworm in the past.
“Yeah, we had screwworm a long time ago, but most folks that are in the marketplace, you know, a large majority of them were not around during that time and didn’t see what happened in the marketplace, and you know, how does the market react, and how do people react to something that they hadn’t seen in quite a bit? It creates a lot of uncertainty, i.e., a lot of risk in the market, and when you have uncertainty in that risk, it’s kind of hard to pin down what we’ll see. But in the meantime, we do know that there’s a restriction on animals being moved, so that impacts supply.”