The Consejo Coordinador Empresarial (CCE), a powerful employers' group that contributes 80 percent of Mexico's GDP, has appointed an executive from the Italian-Argentinian steel giant Ternium, Judith Garza Rangel, as coordinator of a team of 34 working committees that support the Mexican government towards the 2026 review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the trade agreement between the three countries.
Since the negotiations of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the predecessor of the USMCA in the 90s, the private business sector in Mexico has promoted a mechanism to support the process of negotiating international trade agreements. This mechanism is called in Mexico "Cuarto de Junto" or "Task Force".
The team coordinated by Judith Garza Rangel, senior institutional director of Ternium Mexico, has been working for six months with the Ministry of Economy on the review of the USMCA, the CCE said in a press release.
The working committees coordinated by Garza Rangel include more than 300 business organizations from the entire national productive sector.
The USMCA is the main market for Mexican trade flow. In 2023, of $905 billion, the United States and Canada represented 88.8 percent of that total.
Ternium's representation in the "Task Force" plays an important role because historically Mexico has had a deficit in the steel industry, at least in the last 30 years.
Recently, Ternium CEO Máximo Vedoya forecast Mexico's steel deficit with the United States for this year at 2.3 million metric tons, with 2.1 million mt of exports and 4.4 million mt of imports.
With this information, SteelOrbis found that Mexico's steel deficit with the United States will increase by 30.5 percent, going from 1.76 million mt in 2023 to 2.3 million in 2024. There is even an explosive increase of 390.6 percent when considering Mexico's trade deficit for 2022, which was 469,000 mt.