Authorities on both sides of the Rio Grande are rushing to contain the renewed advance of the flesh-eating New World screwworm, which has been discovered in cattle across central Mexico and is expected to reach Texas for the first time in decades. The U.S. Department of Agriculture warns that an outbreak could inflict about $1.8 billion in damage on Texas alone, eroding the state’s dominant cattle industry and potentially tightening U.S. beef supplies. In Austin on Friday, Governor Greg Abbott and U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins unveiled a $750 million package to build a domestic sterile-fly production facility in Edinburg, Texas. The plant is designed to turn out up to 300 million sterile screwworm flies each week—tripling current capacity—and forms the centrepiece of a five-pillar federal response aimed at halting the parasite’s northward march. Washington suspended Mexican cattle imports in July, but agriculture officials from both countries on Friday signed a strengthened action plan that sets joint surveillance rules, trap networks and safe-corridor protocols intended to restart cross-border livestock trade once infestations are contained. A complementary U.S. pledge of $100 million will fund interim detection technologies and insecticide campaigns. The latest moves echo a mid-20th-century eradication drive that relied on mass releases of sterile flies. The previous U.S. outbreak, from 1972 to 1976, infected tens of thousands of animals across six states and cost tens of millions of dollars to quash. Officials say the new investments are meant to ensure the pest is again suppressed—this time before it crosses into Texas rangelands.