According to The News, Jorge Puerto Cabrera, President of the Poultry Association in Yucatan said that federal sanitary procedures and regulations prevent the exportation of eggs and poultry from Yucatan to Asia, despite the fact that there is high demand for these products.

“Complying with stringent federal agency regulations to export foods from the Yucatan Peninsula costs local producers a lot of money,” he said.

Martín Quijano said that producers need to comply with at least six federal agencies’ procedures and regulations in order to export poultry.

“You have to comply with the requirements from the Food Production Secretariat (Sagarpa), the Secretariats of Health, Economy, Foreign Affairs and others,” he said.

“In order to export (goods, the Sagarpa requires) that your farm continually applies their training program to your personnel. And when poultry producers comply with this program, then they also need to be evaluated by the Secretariat of Labor and Social Welfare (STPS),” he said.

“Therefore, you have more procedures to follow, plus whatever the country or region where you want to sell your product asks for. (They) have their own requirements, which makes exporting much more complex,” he said.

The worst of it, he said, “is that while Mexican poultry producers have this whole bureaucratic wall to break down, producers from other countries, especially from the United States, are practically given free reign to (export) very low-quality products.”

“US sellers don’t have any problems filling the Mexican market with products that are not qualified (in the U.S.) as being suitable for human consumption and here they are used to make cold cuts and other products that are sold to consumers,” he said.

Many of these products, he said, are sold for pet use in the US, and if their production puts the US sector’s profits at risk, for example an overproduction of these products, then they don’t have any problem selling them to Mexico.

“Without doubt we are facing one of the biggest contradictions in national policies and programs that (are supposed to) encourage agricultural development. Not one authority has wanted to or been able to solve (this problem),” he said.