In Mexico, the swine farming is third in importance for its contribution to the total production of meat. Despite of its minimal participation in the Mexican GDP (about 0.3%), the swine farming has become a relevant sector as provides a set of important products in the Mexican diet and a high quality export product.

Swine industry is concentrated in the private sector (90% of the production units and 94% of the herds). It is estimated that 70% of private units are complete cycle, the rest are fattening farms, breeding farms in a lesser quantity and a very small number of farms producing breeding stock.

With the same intention we will describe the situation of swine sector in the state of Sonora (one of the most technified states of the country) focusing on 6 aspects that have influenced or transformed during the process: modernization and technological change, socioeconomic structure, regional impact, productive structure, producer organization and sanity. Mentioning the state of all these matters will give us information about the situation of the swine industry (SWOT analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats due to globalization).

Currently the state of Sonora is immersed to one of the most important crisis, after beating some of them from 90’s until now, due to the unfortunately coincidence of two factors: the swine flu and the world economic crisis. Apart from these two factors, we must take into account the existing ones: uncontrolled imports, subsidies to U.S. farmers that leads to unfair competition, increases in inputs, and so on.

That has caused the closure of farms, however, these ones have been absorbed by large producers, which in spite of the crisis, they have endured  because of its integration with the export market, generating brands of products, even giving them added value with sausage factories, dishes prepared and trading with final customers directly. It is clear that small producers have to integrate into the supply chain that reaches the consumer directly, and elaborate competitive quality products.

So we can conclude that in order to achieve high productivity, which has been a continuous goal for producers, both at nutritional, health and technology level has not yet been possible due to emergence of new viruses. Thus we are obliged to keep investigating in order to reach the expected results by implementation of efficient sanitary measures