Among other threats targeting Mexico during his election campaign, U.S. President Donald Trump harshly criticized the North American Free Trade Agreement. As Trump has pointed out, NAFTA contributed to a U.S. trade deficit with Mexico reaching US$63.2 billion last year. This is the country's fourth-largest trade deficit, after China, Japan and Germany. America's deficit with the other NAFTA nation, Canada, was slightly over US$11 billion in 2016.But that's only part of the story. Remove cars and auto part imports, for example, and the U.S. deficit with Mexico virtually disappears. Overall, NAFTA has been beneficial to Mexico, Canada and the U.S. alike. Since it was signed in 1994, foreign direct investments (FDI) in Mexico have averaged 2.6 percent of GDP (compared to 1 percent for two decades before NAFTA). At present, annual bilateral trade between the U.S. and Mexico is running at US$580 billion. Much of Trump's outdated protectionist rhetoric hinges on manufacturing, outsourcing of jobs to Mexico and immigration. Agriculture – a key link between the two nations – does not seem to have entered his calculations.Globalization may have contributed to manufacturing job losses in the U.S., but it has had significant benefits for the American agricultural sector. U.S. exports of agricultural products to Mexico have increased nearly fivefold since NAFTA was signed.For the 2014–15 crop marketing year, U.S. corn production was 360 million metric tons, 13 percent of which was exported. Mexico accounted for 23 percent of these exports.In 2016, Mexico imported US$17.9 billion in American agricultural products: US$2.6 billion in corn, US$1.5 billion in soybeans, US$1.3 billion in pork and US$1.2 billion in dairy products.Around 98 percent of the corn that forms a staple of the Mexican diet comes from the U.S. Mexico also buys 7.8 percent of all U.S. pork production.As America threatens to close its agricultural export door, it has damaged Mexico's confidence in the reliability of its major supplier – perhaps permanently. In a January 2017 Washington Post opinion piece, former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo wrote that it was a "waste of time" to play "NAFTA tweaking games with the Trump Administration."Though Mexico currently has free trade agreements with 45 countries (more than any other country in the world), agriculture has consistently been the most sensitive issue in Mexico's free trade agreements. Trump has changed that.Today, the country is accelerating its search for new partners to meet its national agricultural needs. Sensing long-term opportunities, Brazil and Argentina – both major exporters of beef, wheat, soybeans and other prized U.S. agricultural products – are elbowing their way to the front of the queue. Neither currently has a free trade agreement with Mexico.