Mexico’s Leading Presidential Candidate Champions Green Energy, Nearshoring Projects
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Mexico’s leading presidential hopeful is vowing to deepen the country’s commitment to sustainability and bolster U.S. trade ties if elected.
Claudia Sheinbaum, the former Head of Government of Mexico City and a member of the Morena political party, on Friday told attendees at a banking event on the coast of Mexico that her administration will place a premium on renewable energy and water management.
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Doing so will be a tenet of Sheinbaum’s strategy for industrial development, which includes investing in industrial parks as a means of spurring more nearshoring relationships with U.S. buyers and creating more freight and passenger train networks to boost regional transportation.
Sheinbaum has been favored to win the June presidential election, with many of her policies mirroring current President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. U.S. News and World Report reported that Sheinbaum said Mexico’s trade agreements with the U.S. and Canada represent “enormous potential” for the country, though she added that her administration would seek to maintain healthy trade with China.
Sheinbaum earlier this month told Spanish newspaper Vanguardia that she hopes to “build 100 industrial parks in the country linked to this vision of development with wellbeing and sustainability.”
“The northern zone has very specific opportunities that are not replicated throughout the country; there is an opportunity for nearshoring and offshoring that can be relocated to the south to provide space for new companies close to the border to develop,” she added.
Mexico has been gaining ground when it comes to U.S. trade, surpassing China earlier this year as the nation’s leading trading partner.
The proof is in the logistics expansion. Third-party logistics (3PL) players like Ryder, Echo, C.H. Robinson, Arrive Logistics and BlueGrace Logistics have opened offices, or built out a larger presence, in Mexico over the past six months alone.
And QIMA data from March shows that the interest in nearshoring is “at a record high and rising.” The inspections and auditing firm’s survey of 800 global businesses revealed that 54 percent of U.S. enterprises see nearshoring or reshoring as a pivotal part of their 2024 sourcing strategy. Over half of the survey’s respondents said they bought more from regional suppliers in 2023, and plan to maintain those plans moving forward.
There are some hurdles that could hinder the acceleration of U.S. nearshoring from Mexico, however. The country ranked No. 5 in Verisk Maplecroft’s Political Risk Dataset released earlier this year. The predictive model, which forecasts civil unrest risks in countries across the globe, showed protests on commercial highways surrounding civil rights and police brutality could stymie the flow of goods and access to critical commercial centers like Mexico City, Guadalajara and Hermosillo.
And if the country deepens its trade ties with China, that could create friction with the U.S., especially ahead of a presidential election. Getting tough on China is a key tenet of both candidates’ campaign platforms. Last week, President Joe Biden signaled that he would urge the U.S. Trade Representative to triple tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from China.
