UNITED STATES - MEXICO CHAMBER OF COMMERCE

Since the passage of NAFTA in 1993, and its provisions to assure sustainable economic development, there has been growing emphasis on environmental compliance and enforcement throughout North America. Both the United States and Mexico are engaged in a multifaceted approach to improve environmental infrastructure in the border region and elsewhere. In 1996, Mexico’s federal government completed a major revision of its 1988 General Law of Ecological Equilibrium, and has since been revising regulations and technical standards for consistency with the revised general law. Additionally, Mexico has been in the process of decentralizing authority for enforcement of certain environmental regulatory activities from the federal government to the states and municipalities. This has resulted in a proliferation of state and municipal laws and regulations to match the shift in jurisdictional authority, many of which are not readily available to the trade community.

The presence of impaired access to - or uncertainty about -- Mexico’s environmental regulations constitutes a significant non-tariff barrier to trade. As a result, the United States Department of Commerce through Congressional action awarded a grant to the U.S.-Mexico Chamber of Commerce (USMCOC) to improve the business community’s access to and understanding of Mexico’s environmental laws. The principal purpose of this website is to improve electronic access to current and evolving Mexican laws in Spanish and English.

Through a cooperative agreement ("Convenio") with Mexico’s Federal Secretariat for the Environment, Natural Resources, and Fisheries (SEMARNAT), the USMCOC is collaborating with Mexico’s government for the analysis and collection of data for the database, and in the design of the website. In addition, the Project has encouraged the involvement of academic communities in both countries to lend their expertise in environmental policy and Internet data research, analysis and specialized processing techniques for preparing data for the web. Some of the technical support for the development of the prototype and production systems is being provided by subcontract.

ACCESS-Mexico Project tasks include the collection, analysis, organization, formatting, verification and dissemination of Mexico’s environmental laws, regulations and technical standards associated with Federal, state and municipal levels of government. The baseline database initially created in Spanish will eventually all be replicated in English on a priority basis. A substantial effort has been required to assemble and process original Spanish language data (much of it manually) due to a lack of availability of many Mexican state and municipal laws in electronic format.

A concerted effort was undertaken during the development of a prototype to assess the business community’s needs and preferences for the data and the design of the system. The types of users likely to need the system include, legal practitioners and scholars, environmental technology manufacturers, environmental compliance and pollution prevention experts, corporate environmental managers, trade specialists and members of the general public wanting to know about Mexico’s environmental regulatory regime. From interpreting these users’ needs, the project team developed a set of user and functional requirements for the design of the system.

Functionally, the website has been designed to allow users to search for data in a variety of ways. These include: basic (keyword) searches, enabled by Boolean search technology; a site browser designed to provide users with several "views" (or perspectives) of the data; advanced searches with standard query capabilities; and hypothetical case studies based on specified sector-based scenarios.

The USMCOC welcomes you to this website under development and invites you to become one of our users. We also welcome any comments you might have, which can be sent to the Webmaster.