Houston and Mexico seek to boost mutual trade

By JENALIA MORENO Copyright 2010 Houston Chronicle

March 11, 2010, 12:12AM

Houston and Mexican officials inked an agreement this week promising to promote more trade between the two longtime partners.

The move comes as the global economic slowdown coupled with Mexico's drug war has hampered the nation's growth.

On Wednesday, officials from ProMexico, Mexico's business institution, stopped in the Bayou City to encourage investors and business leaders to consider working in Mexico, especially in its fledgling movie production and aerospace manufacturing industries.

In the next few weeks, officials from the Greater Houston Partnership and ProMexico will meet again to figure out the industries they will focus on and ways to increase trade.

The memorandum of understanding “is a recognition that we can do more,” said Jose Antonio Torre, chief intelligence officer for ProMexico, an agency created to draw more foreign investment to Mexico and trade with the nation. It operates an office in Houston.

The government recently announced a plan to offer incentives to creative companies like movie production houses to set up operations in Mexico. “Somehow we were losing that ability to attract major movies,” Torre said.

Mexico's aerospace sector is also increasing, with 220 such firms last year, compared with 61 in 2005, Torre said during a meeting Wednesday with the Houston Chronicle's editorial board.

Despite such efforts, Mexico's trade with Houston — one of its largest trading partners — dropped by 30 percent to $16.2 billion in 2009 from 2008, in part because of lower oil prices.

Mexican government officials are in a hurry to ink contracts with foreign oil service companies and get on the path to energy reform.

In 2008, Mexican President Felipe Calderon's government passed what many experts refer to as energy reform light.

Part of that reform granted state-owned oil firm Pemex the right to offer incentive-based contracts to oil service companies to help boost Mexico's declining oil production and to take over some of its most challenging operations.

However, Mexico is now embroiled in a constitutional challenge to that law.

“I think the likelihood of getting deeper energy reform is more remote,” said Tony Garza, a former ambassador to Mexico for the United States.

jenalia.moreno@chron.com

nancy@callnancyfurst.com