FROM avocado orchards to border factories, Mexican exporters who have prospered under two decades of NAFTA face the prospect of an abrupt end to the boom if U.S. President-elect Donald Trump carries out his threats to ditch the free trade pact.

    Trump said the North American Free Trade Agreement favors Mexico at the expense of U.S. workers and has vowed to either rewrite or withdraw from the deal, as well as build a giant border wall and possibly slap steep tariffs on imports.

    Since the treaty took effect in 1994, Mexican exports to the United States have jumped six-fold to some US$320 billion a year, transforming a once-closed economy into a hub for investment and a workshop for some of the world’s biggest companies.

    So business leaders there were stunned as Trump romped to victory Tuesday night, upsetting the widespread expectation in Mexico that his candidacy would fade.

    “(We) couldn’t believe what was unfolding before our eyes,” said Marcello Hinojosa, president of the Canacintra industrial chamber in Tijuana, the border city whose economy is based on a mix of U.S. tourism and assembly plants.

    “Our main partner where we export is the United States. So if we take that away we’re going to have a lot of unemployment, we’re going to have a really big trade deficit,” said Hinojosa, who runs a company that collects factory waste.

    Trump has threatened to impose tariffs of up to 35 percent on Mexican-made goods and said he would scrap NAFTA if he cannot renegotiate what he calls the “worst deal ever.”

    His victory has also put new pressure on automakers and other manufacturers that have become dependent on open trade with Mexico.

    If NAFTA is scrapped, “it would be terrible” for the members of the Automotive Cluster of Nuevo Leon, said the group’s director, Manuel Montoya. Nuevo Leon is a northern state bordering the United States. And it would hurt consumers, he said.

    NAFTA brought mixed results for Mexican agriculture, with the sector suffering a net loss of 1.9 million jobs between 1991 to 2007 in the face of competition from U.S. agribusiness, according to a 2014 study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

    But there have been clear winners too, such as avocado farmers who since 2007 have been able to sell their fashionable fruit north of the border, triggering a “green gold” rush that some say has stemmed migration and crime in some of Mexico’s most troubled regions.

    Mexico exported more than 1.7 billion pounds (771,000 tons) of the fruit to the United States in 2015, more than six times the amount a decade earlier, according to the Hass Avocado Board.

    The United States has overtaken Mexico as the world’s top avocado consumer, said Ramon Paz, spokesman for an avocado growers group in Michoacan state.(SD-Agencies)