Shares of San Mateo-based action camera maker GoPro, Inc. jumped more than 7.5 percent in midday trading today, after the company said it would begin producing U.S.-bound cameras in Mexico in June, in an attempt to avoid President Trump’s escalating trade war with China.

GoPro shares began the month trading at around $5.85 per share, but crossed $7 per share today, representing a two-week gain of roughly 20 percent. The stock hasn’t traded above $7 per share since October.

The camera company said it’s activating a new production line in Guadalajara that will make cameras bound for U.S. retailers. Those cameras will begin appearing on store shelves in the third quarter.

“As stated previously, our decision to move most of our U.S. bound production to Mexico supports our goal to insulate us against possible tariffs as well as recognize some cost savings and efficiencies,” GoPro CFO Brian McGee said in a statement.

GoPro will continue manufacturing cameras in China, but will export those cameras to international retailers. The company initially announced the move in December, anticipating that the trade war with China might continue to escalate.

Their two weeks of gains stands in stark contrast with Cupertino-based iPhone maker Apple Inc., which has seen its shares fall more than 9 percent since the start of the month.

Apple’s supply chain is far more complicated than GoPro’s, and new tariffs on Apple’s entire product line could either eat into the company’s profit margin or get passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices.

Analysts at JPMorgan say Apple would need to raise consumer prices on the iPhone by 14 percent to maintain its existing profit margin, turning a $1,000 phone into a $1,142 phone, CNBC reports. Analysts at Bank of America estimate Apple would have to increase the retail price of the iPhone by 20 percent if it were to shift manufacturing from China to the U.S.

“We estimate the incremental cost of manufacturing iPhones in the U.S. could be 15-25%, and, if passed on to consumers could lead to demand destruction, in our view,” Bank of America analysts wrote.

Trump on Friday raised tariffs on some $200 billion worth of Chinese exports, and threatened to enact new tariffs on the remaining $325 billion of Chinese goods. China responded Monday with retaliatory tariffs on $60 billion worth of American exports.

It appears the Trump administration isn’t all that interested in a deal to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) after all.

Last week, White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney was sanguine about the prospect of Congress rejecting NAFTA’s proposed replacement, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). “You could stay status quo,” Mulvaney told a California business conference. “Your real Plan Bs are either NAFTA or withdraw from NAFTA.”

It might be that U.S. President Donald Trump has reverted to his years-long preference to simply kill NAFTA without replacing it.

Trump won’t budge on the reasonable changes that Congressional Democrats seek to make to the USMCA agreement.

He also seems determined to keep in place the steel and aluminum tariffs he applied against Canada and Mexico about a year ago. And that alone pretty much guarantees that all three national legislatures will reject USMCA.

Citing the harm that Canada and Mexico’s retaliatory tariffs have done in his state, U.S. Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, in charge of spearheading USMCA’s passage in the U.S. Senate, said last month that “If these tariffs aren’t lifted, USMCA is dead.”

Yet U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said recently that the tariffs will be revisited only after USMCA ratification. That makes USMCA ratification unlikely.

But the odds of NAFTA’s demise are also low. Only Capitol Hill, not the president, can kill a treaty.

Grassley, for one, won’t be a party to NAFTA’s demise. His state, Iowa, has reaped a quadrupling of agricultural exports under NAFTA.

Canada’s plan for salvaging NAFTA must include continued pressure on U.S. federal and state legislators, and constant reminders of the 12 million U.S. jobs tied to the trade agreement.

MEXICO CITY/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Japan’s SoftBank Group invested about $20 million in Mexican payments startup Clip early this year, one of its first Latin America deals as it launches a $5 billion technology fund in the region, said three people familiar with the matter.

The technology conglomerate’s cash injection was part of a round that raised roughly $100 million, two of the people said last week.

Clip’s valuation after the transaction rose to between $350 million and $400 million, the two sources said. Clip’s total funding to date is roughly $160 million.

Clip told Reuters SoftBank and New York investment firm General Atlantic have invested in the company, without providing details.

SoftBank Latin America chief executive Marcelo Claure declined to comment on Clip in an interview last month.

SoftBank struck the deal shortly before announcing in March that it would launch the $5 billion Innovation Fund focusing on Latin America.

Mexican investors hope the fund’s deep pockets will be a gamechanger for young companies that struggle to fundraise locally.

“Growth will be faster, more dramatic and more competitive,” Fernando Gonzalez, a partner at Virginia-based QED Investors and CEO of Mexican fintech startup Coru, said last week.

SoftBank announced a $1 billion investment in Colombian delivery app Rappi last Tuesday, citing the startup’s swift growth as a sign of opportunity in the region. Along with fintech, SoftBank also plans to target e-commerce, healthcare and mobility.

The $20 million Clip investment is unusually small for a firm that typically leads funding rounds and writes checks at least four times that size. SoftBank is also famed for running the world’s largest technology fund, with $100 billion in capital.

But, unlike Asia and the United States, Latin America is a nascent tech market where startups typically have lower valuations and face less competition, meaning even small cash infusions propel growth. In Mexico, startups rarely raise $100 million in a single go.

Claure, who oversees the fund, said in early April the firm had closed some deals and was in the process of finalizing others. His team has looked at more than 140 companies in Latin America, he added.

SoftBank typically pours cash into the most promising companies in each sector within each region that it targets, aiming to help companies scale fast and push out competitors.

Clip, founded in 2012, offers a mobile credit card reader that fits onto smartphones. Businesses across Mexico such as cafes, corner stores and street vendors have adopted the service as a simple, low-cost way to accept cards rather than just cash.

Investors see Mexico as an attractive market for fintech because many people do not have bank accounts but have access to mobile phones, said Eric Perez-Grovas, general partner at local investment firm Jaguar Ventures.

“You have the perfect elements to create fintech giants in this country,” he said.

Long lines for cargo trucks trying to cross into the U.S. are affecting businesses on the border and beyond, according to testimony before a U.S. House Homeland Security subcommittee in Washington, D.C., this week.

“What we’re experiencing along the border threatens the economic security of our country,” Jon Barela, CEO of the Borderplex Alliance, told federal lawmakers.

The alliance promotes economic development in Doña Ana County, El Paso and Ciudad Juárez.

The hearing before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border Security, Facilitation and Operations examined the effects of the Trump administration’s policies on border communities.

One result is cargo trucks in long lines backed up into Mexico for miles waiting to cross into the U.S. after 750 Customs and Border Protection officers were removed from ports of entry and reassigned to help Border Patrol agents deal with an influx of migrants seeking asylum.

“We’re in total agreement that the ripple effect could turn into a tsunami for the United States if we don’t solve these wait times, which we are currently experiencing between 8 and 24 hours as we speak,” Barela testified.

Nearly $82 billion worth of trade between the U.S. and Mexico comes through ports of entry annually in the region that includes Doña Ana County, El Paso and Juárez.

“We simply cannot do business in our region nor can the United States afford this sort of ripple effect, which will, again, become an economic tsunami if we’re not careful,” Barela testified.

‘Utter chaos and confusion’ at ports of entry

Companies using New Mexico’s busiest border crossing, Santa Teresa, are also coping with long delays.

“They’re on very tight supply chains, just in time, and those have been disrupted and not just here. The disruption goes all the way back to the Midwest,” said Border Industrial Association President and CEO Jerry Pacheco.

The truck lines had stretched into Mexico up to five hours, but now the lines are about three hours, Pacheco said. The delays are still much longer than usual, and some don’t make it across and into the U.S. before the Santa Teresa port of entry closes at 8 p.m.

“If they’re an hour out, they just sleep in their trucks at night to keep their place in line,” Pacheco said.

The subcommittee chairwoman, U.S. Rep. Kathleen Rice, D-NY, told the hearing that Congress had approved a Department of Homeland Security budget that included $60 million to hire an additional 1,000 Customs and Border Protection officers to staff ports of entry.

“The administration’s border policies, coupled with the president’s threats to close the border altogether and his incendiary immigration rhetoric, have created utter chaos and confusion at our ports of entry,” Rice said in her opening remarks.

More technology needed at border

U.S. Rep. Xochitl Torres Small, a Democrat who represents southern New Mexico’s border region, also serves on the subcommittee and reiterated the impact of long wait times in her district.

“We lost an estimated 20 percent of our workforce, resulting in the closure of multiple commercial lanes and wait time of up to six hours for trucks to cross the border,” Torres Small said.

She wants CBP to employ more technology to protect the border and facilitate trade at busy ports of entry.

“Every day, thousands of trucks and cars pass through our ports of entry. But due to staffing shortages and inefficient technology, only a small percentage of vehicles are scanned by nonintrusive inspection technology for illicit drugs, contraband, and human trafficking,” Torres Small said.

“By investing in smarter and more efficient technology at our ports of entry, such as NII (nonintrusive inspection technology), we are both enhancing the safety of communities across the U.S. and growing our economy through increased flows of legitimate trade,” she said in a statement released Wednesday with Texas Republican Dan Crenshaw about a letter they sent to the acting secretary of homeland security asking for an update on implementing the nonintrusive inspection technology at border crossings.

Torres Small has also co-sponsored bipartisan legislation to hire more Border Patrol agents for rural areas like New Mexico’s Bootheel region.

‘Significant and meaningful’ resources needed

Expert testimony about the effects of policies on border communities at Tuesday’s hearing also included the bishop of the Catholic Diocese of El Paso, the director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, and the Pima County sheriff from Arizona, who represented the Southwestern Border Sheriffs’ Coalition.

Bishop Mark Seitz told the subcommittee about the diocese’s temporary shelters for migrant families seeking asylum.

“My brother bishops and I also remain deeply troubled by the administration’s recent efforts to curtail the ability of asylum-seekers arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border to seek protection,” Bishop Seitz said.

The sheriff of Arizona’s largest border county called on lawmakers for help.

“We need action from Washington, D.C., not partisan politics,” said Pima County Sheriff Mark Napier. “We need significant and meaningful additional resources to bolster both our public safety and our humanitarian efforts to address this crisis.”

Mexican Ambassador to the U.S. Martha Barcena Coqui on Monday said the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement’s pioneering labor reforms shouldn’t be taken for granted.

The U.S. labor movement should “seize the opportunity” and embrace the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement’s (USMCA’s) groundbreaking labor reforms, which were not even considered until Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was elected on July 1, Mexican Ambassador to the U.S. Martha Barcena Coqui said Monday.

U.S. labor organizations have complained that USMCA labor provisions won’t be enforceable, and the AFL-CIO recently announced its opposition to the agreement absent a renegotiation of labor provisions. House Democrats have expressed similar sentiments.

But NAFTA’s state-to-state dispute settlement mechanism, which would be used to enforce USMCA labor provisions, has failed mainly because the U.S. opted to not submit its roster of arbitrators to serve on dispute panels, Barcena said during an event at Georgetown Law School.

USMCA parties can ensure labor enforcement has teeth if they simply submit their lists of panelists at the same time USMCA is ratified, Barcena said.

“You will never find another partner as [the Mexican] government,” Barcena said in response to a comment by AFL-CIO trade and globalization policy specialist Celeste Drake. “Believe me.”

Drake said the U.S. has been on the receiving end of promises by Mexico for 25 years and by other trading partners that they will protect workers, enforce domestic laws and provide workers with legitimate opportunities to organize, Drake said. “The fact is they haven’t.”

After endorsing Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency during the last election cycle, AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka said on Fox Business on Election Day in 2016 that a NAFTA renegotiation under a Clinton administration would involve organized labor having a seat at the negotiating table, an approach to NAFTA he said he would support.

A report of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative’s Labor Advisory Committee on Trade Negotiations and Trade Policy at the end of the negotiation noted the Trump administration’s level of engagement with organized labor was an improvement over prior trade agreement negotiations, but criticized the fact that the talks took place behind closed doors.

Barcena said Mexican labor reform legislation expected to pass Mexico’s Congress this week will ensure enforcement of USMCA labor provisions by Mexican domestic bodies, including independent labor courts, as well as labor boards that would resolve disputes and register contracts between workers and companies.

“If there is a violation of the labor laws in Mexico, workers can go to the labor courts and they have a speedy procedure,” she said. “What else do you want for enforcement? What can you ask a country internally to do if you have those enforcements in place?”
The lower house of Mexico’s Congress has approved the labor reform legislation, and the Mexican Senate is expected to approve it later this week, Barcena said.

“There will be free unions and we will ensure union leadership is overhauled,” she said.
Mexico currently has a system of “protection unions,” unions that are company controlled. Barcena said the labor reform legislation would dismantle this system.

The Mexican government is working on a road map to implement the labor legislation, and some of the institutions to be created by the legislation should be in place next year, she said.

After the legislation is passed, Mexico will have to review 700,000 protection contracts in four years, Barcena said.
“We are already preparing what kind of technical cooperation we can work with the U.S. authorities, and maybe with the help of [U.S.] labor unions themselves, because [they] may have more experience in certain areas,” she said. “The reviewing of the contracts will be of extreme importance. It will be very relevant and would hope to have the collaboration of the labor movement in the U.S.”

Trumka on Tuesday said he opposes ratification of USMCA because he doubts Mexico will enforce labor reforms required by the pact, noting that he wants to see Mexico’s ability to amend the 700,000 protection contracts in the four-year time span required by the agreement, AFP reported.

Wait times at the ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border have soared as the Trump administration diverts officers to handle an influx of immigrants, leaving trucks backed up for hours and industry leaders warning of possible produce shortages and supply-chain interruptions.

The clogged checkpoints are frustrating bankers, business leaders, local residents and even Mexico’s foreign minister, who called the reassignment of hundreds of border officers to other parts of the nearly 2,000-mile boundary a “very bad idea.” The shift in enforcement efforts is overwhelming legal checkpoints and impeding the free flow of goods and services, in some cases increasing wait times about fivefold.

Executives described the scene at the southern boundary as a slow-motion facsimile of the border closure that President Trump threatened two weeks ago before backing down amid protests that shutting down the border would hurt the economy. Trump said he would consider closing the border as a punitive measure if Mexico doesn’t take steps to reduce the flow of migrants to the United States within the next year.

Those now suffering the most because of backlogs at understaffed ports of entry are automakers, technology companies and farmers, who say that the slowdown is affecting the $1.7 billion-a-day in goods that crosses the border between the United States and Mexico. Delays at ports in Texas have at times exceeded 10 hours in recent days.

“This is a big, big cost and problem for companies, on top of everything else they’re dealing with,” said Rufus Yerxa, president of the National Foreign Trade Council. “It’s just more uncertainty and more pain.”

On Monday, cargo trucks waited up to two hours to cross the bridge from Mexico into Brownsville, Tex., a city that had no delays at this time last year. On El Paso’s Bridge of the Americas, cars and SUVs idled for 160 minutes, up from 45 minutes a year ago. Southern California’s Otay Mesa cargo processing section took 270 minutes to push trucks through its crossing this week, up from 50 minutes last year.

The lengthy delays are rippling through supply chains, resulting in higher costs and production disruptions. Because the wait times have grown so large, some companies are adding a second driver to their trucks because of government regulations limiting the number of hours a driver can work without resting.

The streets around the Otay Mesa commercial crossing into San Diego were filled with bored and frustrated truckers.

Juan Macareno, a truck driver from Ensenada, Mexico, said he has waited as long as six to eight hours to clear the border checkpoints during the past two weeks, up from the usual two hours. On Wednesday, he chatted on the phone and scrolled through his WhatsApp messages as traffic inched along.

“Just waiting,” he said, after driving a produce-filled truck into California. “You have nothing to do.”

Drivers say they are taking fewer routes, and others have been forced to stay overnight at some checkpoints because there aren’t enough officers to process the long lines of trucks.

Homeland Security officials say they are not intentionally slowing down processing times, but they acknowledge the frustrations the long lines have produced are helping them convey the severity of the border crisis.

With 545 Customs and Border Protection officers reassigned to help the Border Patrol, a negative impact on travel times and cargo inspections is inevitable, one DHS official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to offer candid views.

“Our intention is not to slow down commerce, it’s to provide some relief to what’s going on at the border,” the official said.

Border Patrol officials have repeatedly warned that immigration holding cells are jammed beyond capacity, with 10,000 to 13,000 in custody, creating dangerous and unsanitary conditions for migrants and officers. Authorities have said they are overwhelmed at the border and need more detention beds, officers and judicial support to process the rush of migrants.

Some executives worry that if short staffing at the border checkpoints causes delays to continue, Mexico could retaliate by slowing southbound traffic. In a rare rebuke of U.S. immigration policy Wednesday, Mexico’s Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard tweeted that the border slowdown is “creating costs . . . for both Mexico and the United States.”

High-level officials and business leaders are expected to discuss the delays Thursday and Friday at the U.S.-Mexico CEO Dialogue in Merida, a meeting held twice a year.

The slowdowns at the border have come as the Department of Homeland Security has faced political upheaval amid a record surge of migrants that included apprehensions topping 100,000 last month. The crossings have infuriated the president, leading to the ouster of DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who officially resigned effective Wednesday, days after Trump rescinded the nomination of her top immigration enforcement deputy, Ronald Vitiello. He announced his resignation Wednesday. The next acting commissioner of CBP will be John Sanders, the agency’s chief operating officer, a DHS official said Wednesday.

CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, who ran the agency that apprehends migrants at the border and screens cars and trucks passing through legal checkpoints, took over as acting DHS secretary on Wednesday. McAleenan takes over as the Trump administration seeks a solution for what it considers an illegal migration crisis but also as officers struggle to maintain order over legal trade at the border.

In an informal survey by the Original Equipment Suppliers Association, 42 percent of its members reported suffering delays in their shipments from Mexico to the United States. Of those companies, two-thirds said the delays reached seven to 12 hours, according to Julie Fream, the group’s president.

The association’s members, which include companies such as Johnson Controls, Eaton and Tenneco, produce original equipment for automobiles.

Automakers are perhaps the most vulnerable to a prolonged border slowdown. The industry sends half-finished cars back and forth across the southern border multiple times and relies on Mexican factories to produce critical parts, such as the wire harnesses that organize a vehicle’s electrical cables. Continued disruption of shipping could soon interrupt production at American factories.

“That’s the concern,” said Neil Bradley, executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “We’re getting closer to that point.”

Companies already are preparing to reroute cargo. Just one more day of backlogs would be enough for one-third of those responding to the survey to switch cargoes from trucks to airfreight, Fream said.

“All of those asked said they would seek alternatives if the delays continue for a week,” Fream said. “These alternatives are very costly.”

The Port of Nogales, Ariz., a chronically understaffed major crossing point for fresh fruit and vegetables, was slated to receive an extra 75 border agents. But those agents have been redeployed to cope with the migrant surge, according to Lance Jungmeyer, president of the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas.

“This is the new normal until they solve the problem at the border,” he said Wednesday.

Though delays in Nogales are not as severe as in Texas, they come after years of improvement in processing time. When Jungmeyer started working in Nogales in 2010, customs waits sometimes stretched to seven hours. Before the current staffing crunch, typical truck processing times were one hour or less, he said.

In an April 4 conference call, CBP officials told shippers they should expect delays to persist “for the foreseeable future.”

If the migration surge continues for 30 more days — as it is predicted to do — the agency plans to strip some agents from airport posts to further reinforce the border deployment, Jungmeyer said he was told. Beyond that, agents will be taken from the northern ports of entry with Canada and shifted to the border.

Jungmeyer said shifting resources away from the ports comes with costs that go beyond shipping delays: “We’re only making our ports of entry less secure. We’re encouraging bad players to take advantage of the ports of entry. We need to get customs officers back on line at the ports.”

U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Tex.) on Wednesday urged an effort to reduce the wait times at the border, calling on the Trump administration to “listen to the countless industries that rely on cross-border trade.”

The Texas International Produce Association asked McAleenan to dispatch officers and agents from the northern U.S. border and seaports to reduce delays. Their members report that wait times to cross the border have risen from 30 minutes to four-and-a-half hours.

“We haven’t seen issues like this in probably six years,” said Dante Galeazzi, CEO and president of the association, adding that the group is warning supermarkets and restaurants to expect delays and possibly shortages of avocados, mangoes, limes and other goods. “Obviously we think it’s a bad thing.”

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Wednesday that talks with White House senior adviser Jared Kushner have led to advances toward an agreement that would have the U.S. government guarantee some $10 billion in development investments for Mexico and Central America.

The previously discussed investments would aim to reduce immigration from Mexico and Central America by providing more opportunities in those countries. Roughly half of the sum would go to Mexico while the remainder would be divided among Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, Lopez Obrador said.

“That is investment to create jobs so that the people don’t have the need to abandon their communities, their families, their regions, their customs, their culture,” he said. “That is the dream that we want to convert into a reality.”

He said they were nearing an agreement and that he would consider traveling to the U.S. if there is a solid accord to sign.

Mexico has been under pressure from the U.S. to address the flow of Central American immigrants through the country. Several migrant caravans have drawn the ire of U.S. President Donald Trump.

Mexico has stepped up its offering of visas that would allow Central Americans to stay and work in Mexico and also agreed to a U.S. program that forces some who seek asylum in the U.S. to wait in Mexico while their cases are processed.

Some have criticized Mexico for efforts to slow the migration flow to the U.S. even while Trump continues to demand funding to extend a barrier along the entire U.S.-Mexico border.

Lopez Obrador, a leftist, had campaigned on the idea of improving economic and security conditions in Mexico sufficiently so that Mexicans would not have to migrate.

“We have the conviction that with the programs that are being implemented in our country there is going to be zero migration of Mexicans,” he said Wednesday. “Mexicans aren’t going to need to go to work in the United States because there is going to be work.”

Lopez Obrador and Trump’s son-in-law dined Tuesday in the Mexico City home of Bernardo Gomez, co-executive president of Grupo Televisa.

Lopez Obrador said there is a “very good relationship with the U.S. government.”

The civil relationship between Lopez Obrador and Trump has surprised some who expected the two strong personalities to clash. Lopez Obrador’s predecessor Enrique Pena Nieto was harshly criticized for not standing up more strongly to Trump’s verbal attacks on Mexico and one of his final acts as president was giving Kushner the Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest honor the country gives to foreigners.

But Lopez Obrador has been careful to maintain a relationship of “mutual respect” and members of his Cabinet were involved in the renegotiation of the free trade agreement before he had even taken office.

The Mexican leader said he and Kushner also discussed the pending ratification of the new trade agreement, dubbed the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

Mexico’s Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard and John Creamer, the charge d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy, also attended the dinner.

President Donald Trump is escalating his pressure on General Motors, as he calls for the company to reopen an Ohio manufacturing plant.

Trump tweeted Monday that GM should: “Close a plant in China or Mexico, where you invested so heavily pre-Trump,” and “Bring jobs home!”

Trump travels to politically important Ohio this week. Over the weekend, Trump tweeted that officials should start talks with the United Auto Workers immediately so that the Lordstown plant could be reopened or sold.

General Motors said in a statement Sunday that the future of plants scheduled to be closed “will be resolved between GM and the UAW.” The automaker said that they had “opportunities available for virtually all impacted employees.”

While a chorus of business and industry leaders is fighting for Congressional approval of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, some sources believe the near-term outlook appears cloudy at best for the deal.

On March 11, the Pass USMCA Coalition, an alliance of business groups advocating for the swift passage of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, began its first major advertising campaign.

The television and digital advertisements highlight the benefits of the modernized North American trade pact and encourage voters to urge their Congressional representatives to ratify the deal, according to the release.

“The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement will propel American trade into the 21st century,” Gary Locke, honorary co-chairman of Pass USMCA, said in the release. “Millions of Americans who see this first commercial will know it benefits workers and the economy.”

The TV ad can be seen at PassUSMCAnow.org.

The White House also has been lobbying Congress for action, but with little success so far.

House lawmakers have told media that the agreement may not be presented for approval until late summer at the earliest, said Richard Owen, vice president of global business development at the Newark, Del.-based Produce Marketing Association.

While the discord between the U.S. and Mexico on tomato trade issues could complicate consideration of the North American trade deal, overall trade politics are present more of an obstacle, Owen said.

House Democratic leaders may want concessions before they take the agreement up, Owen said.

While the agreement can’t be renegotiated, there could be side letters or implementation language that could help one industry or another.

Whether that type of “side deal” could include tomatoes is unknown, Owen said.

If there was some kind of special treatment for tomatoes, however, Owen said lawmakers representing other industries would also want a chance help their constituents, which could tangle the process.

“So there will certainly be a push within the (tomato) industry to do that (but) whether they’re successful is probably unknown right now.”

In terms of other trade issues, Owen said it was good news that President Trump has indefinitely postponed his previous plan to increase or add new tariffs on Chinese goods on March 1.

“The hope in doing that is to give some more room for negotiators to reach agreement on the current tariffs,” he said. “This is some breathing room now for negotiations to continue to take place,” Owen said.

There is no apparent quick path for current retaliatory tariffs on U.S. produce to exports to China to be lifted soon, he said.
With the U.S. still enforcing a tariff on Mexican steel and aluminum imports, Mexico’s retaliatory tariffs on apples and other goods also remain in place, Owen said. There is no indication when they will be lifted.

Some lawmakers may ask for Trump to lift U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs on Mexico before they consider the U.S. Canada Mexico Agreement, Owen said.

The U.S. and the United Kingdom are talking about trade issues, but Owen said the U.S. produce industry is most interested in getting current trade problems solved.

“Getting the U.S. (Canada) Mexico trade agreement approved and in place and getting the China tariffs removed are probably the highest priorities, and the ones that would affect the greatest parts of the industry,” he said

Desmond O’Rourke, economist and president of Pullman, Wash.based Belrose Inc., said Trump’s trade ambitions have been difficult to achieve.

“Trump took on too many trade battles at one time and is having a hard time getting any of them wound up,” he said.

While Trump had earlier threatened to terminate the existing North American Free Trade Agreement if the new trade deal doesn’t pass, some media commentators speculate that is likely only a bluff.

O’Rourke believes continuing the existing deal wouldn’t find any objections in the Northwest tree fruit industry.

“The current agreement didn’t seem to be causing problems to anybody except Trump,” he said.

OTTAWA — Mexico’s Congress will be asked to approve a major labour-reform bill this spring as a necessary step to ratifying the new North American free-trade pact later this autumn, say Mexican officials.

But unless the Trump administration lifts the punishing tariffs it has imposed on Mexican steel and aluminum imports — duties it also imposed on Canada — Mexico is prepared to keep the status quo with the 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement.

The push to improve workers’ rights in Mexico was a key priority for Canada and the United States during the rocky NAFTA renegotiation because they wanted to level the playing field between their workers and lower-paid Mexican workers, especially in the auto sector.

When Mexico and the U.S. reached their surprise bilateral agreement last August, forcing the Trudeau government to quickly forge a deal with the Trump administration, Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland lauded Mexico for making labour concessions.

But a senior trade official in the new government of socialist reformer Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador suggested in an interview it wasn’t a huge sacrifice because elevating the status of country’s workers was a key plank in the platform that brought their Morena party to power.

Lopez Obrador made it clear in his election campaign that he wanted to strengthen the rights of workers and labour unions, which made a good fit with Canada’s bargaining position, Luz Maria de la Mora, Mexico’s deputy trade minister, said in an interview.

“With the agreement or without the agreement, this is something central to President Lopez Obrador — strengthening workers’ rights and strengthening trade deals in Mexico,” said de la Mora.

She said the new government wants a package of labour reform ratified in Mexico’s Congress before its April 30 adjournment “so we can reflect the commitments that we’ve made under the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement in domestic legislation.”

That means the new agreement will be sent to the Mexican Congress for ratification after it reconvenes in Sept. 1, she said.

But that won’t happen unless the United States lifts its so-called section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum exports, said de la Mora.

U.S. President Donald Trump imposed tariffs of 25 per cent on steel and 10 per cent on aluminum from Mexico and Canada, using the controversial national-security clause in U.S. trade law — “Section 232,” as it’s called in shorthand — that both countries say was illegal.

Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau recently told Trump’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, during a public panel in Washington that the tariffs are “a serious impediment to us moving forward on what is the best trade deal in the world.”

On Nov. 30, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Trump and former Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto, who was on his last day in office, signed the new trade agreement. It now faces ratification by the legislatures of all three countries.

Trudeau spoke to Trump on Thursday and “raised the issue of steel and aluminum tariffs and expressed the need for the removal of tariffs,” the Prime Minister’s Office said.

Canada has been clear from the outset that the tariffs “are illegal and unjustified,” said Adam Austen, a spokesman for Freeland.

“Now that we have concluded our NAFTA negotiation with the United States, we believe it is all the more reason for the U.S. administration to lift its tariffs,” Austen said Sunday, although he did not say specifically whether the issue would lead to a delay in ratification.

If the tariffs aren’t lifted, de la Mora suggested Mexico is fine with the current version of NAFTA that remains in force.

“We hope to have this new agreement in place. But in the absence of the new agreement, we know that NAFTA is good enough,” she said.

Mexico would prefer the updated agreement “for the relations we have with the U.S. and Canada but we are OK with the current NAFTA.”

Mexican senators, who were in Ottawa the past week to conference with their Canadian parliamentary counterparts, echoed de la Mora’s assessment.

“We are going to approve it, but right now our government is trying to deal with this (the tariffs),” Sen. Antares Guadalupe said in an interview.

“We’re not in a rush. Trade right now, it’s working,” she added. “We have many things to do but we want to take it slowly because it is very important to have it in a very good way for Mexico.”

Sen. Hector Vasconcelos, the head of the Mexican Senate’s foreign-affairs committee, said the ratification of the new agreement is also subject to the domestic political situations in all three countries. That includes the ongoing turmoil in the Trump administration and Canada’s legislative clock, which will see the House of Commons adjourn in June until after the October federal election.

Asked what happens if the new agreement is not ratified, Vasconcelos laughed.

“Life goes on, I assure you,” he said, referring to the current NAFTA. “It’s good enough and we will try to get it better. That’s what we are going to do. We have to discuss a lot in Mexico.”