Mexico and Canada have reached an agreement to allow the export of fresh Canadian potatoes to the Mexican market.
The opening of the market will allow Canadian producers to export high-quality potatoes for consumption or processing in Mexico.
Speaking to CBC TV, Canadian Minister of Agriculture and Agrifood Heath MacDonald called it “a very big deal,” adding that “it is important to the Canadian potato industry across the country.”
The agreement, which had been in the works for nearly three years, will give Canada access to a market that had been dominated by the United States as the sole supplier of potatoes to Mexico for the past 20 years.
“All we asked as Canadians is to have the same access as the U.S. has, with one caveat — ensuring that we had access to the seaway,” MacDonald said, explaining that Canada wants to be able to ship its potatoes both by land and by sea.
Mexico is expected to send Agrifood Health, Safety and Quality agents to Canada in June to carry out phytosanitary inspections before the first shipment is authorized.
Mexico and Canada have been working to strengthen bilateral trade ahead of the formal review of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, which gets underway this week.
MacDonald led trade missions to Mexico in October 2025 and again last month, working to build a person-to-person relationship with his Mexican interlocutors, Economy Minister Marcelo Ebrard and Agriculture Minister Julio Berdegué.
The February trade mission, Canada’s largest to Mexico in decades, featured 390 delegates and over 1,700 business meetings. Mexico will make a reciprocal trade mission to Canada in May, dubbed the Mexico-Canada Trade Mission 2026.
The effort — part of a new bilateral action plan agreed to in February — aims to strengthen regulatory cooperation and facilitate trade between the two nations.
During the presentation of Trade Mission 2026 in Mexico City last week, Cameron Mackay, Canada’s ambassador to Mexico, emphasized the “value of productive integration, characterized by binational supply chains in technologically complex sectors such as automobiles and aircraft, as well as agrifood products.”
Bilateral trade exceeds US $100 billion, of which US $60 billion corresponds to Canadian investment and more than US $40 billion to annual trade in goods. Potatoes are the fifth-largest crop in Canada, generating revenues of US $2.1 billion in 2024.
