Why America now eats a crazy number of avocados
wsj.com
wsj.com
Turns out that California is having a good avocado production year. Last year was bad, for usual farming problem reasons.[2] Not really much need for imports for the next few months.
[1] https://hassavocadoboard.com/
[2] https://www.freshfruitportal.com/news/2025/01/30/california-...
"HAPRIO IMPACT The Hass Avocado Promotion, Research and Information Order (HAPRIO) created the Hass Avocado Board (HAB), an industry-funded national program that has been recognized for being key to growing U.S. avocado consumption and driving value for producers and importers since its inception in 2002."
sounds like an apache project.
https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/mexicos-avocado-boom-a...
> While the European Union and Mexico are in the final rounds of negotiations towards the “modernization” of the EU-Mexico Trade Agreement (Global Agreement) our objective is to understand the dynamics of violence that accompanied the avocado boom, including organized crime activities, human rights violations, environmental crime and harm, and the potential impact of further liberalizing trade between Mexico and the EU.
> ...
> Increased international demand led to an expansion of land dedicated to avocado production, to the detriment of forest cover, resulting in deforestation and the subsequent degradation of soil, water, and biodiversity.
> Increased international demand led to an expansion of land dedicated to avocado production
I'm sensitive to that. That is my point on California.
Avocados are not the problem. The cartels will get their cut one way or the other.
Jalisco, Sinaloa, and Nayarit are major petrochemical hubs in Mexico, but when Mexico entered the Peso crisis in the 1990s and China ascended into the WTO in 2000, a major bout of deindustrialization happened in that region.
Turns out chemistry is chemistry, so you had plenty of unemployed chemical engineers and soldiers (the Mexican government did mass layoffs in the army during the peso crisis) which meant you had the brains and muscle needed to enter the drug manufacturing space.
Traffic, for example, came out in 2000 and was based on the ongoing drug war in Mexico. The primary antagonists are the Tijuana Cartel, was formed in the 1980s out of the remnants of the Gaudalara Cartel originally formed in the late 1970s, and the Juarez Cartel, originally formed in 1970. Both cartels have since been superseded by more violent cartels.
Heck, Los Zetas is a notable example, where a bunch of pissed off special forces broke bad because a government salary during the peso devaluation just wouldn't cut it.
Same with the professionalization of synthetic drug manufacturing during the mass layoffs at Pemex during the 1990s.
> Traffic, for example, came out in 2000 and was based on the ongoing drug war in Mexico
Yep! After the Mexican economy straight up collapsed during the 1994 Peso Crisis and the Salinas administration began mass layoffs at Pemex in the early 1990s.
It's ridiculous to ignore the effects of the Peso Crisis and the offshoring of Mexican manufacturing when also talking about the rise of the Cartels during the 1990s-2000s.
Mexico's GDP collapsed by 6.5% in just 1 year (comparable to Lebanon's 2019 Liquidity Crisis), the inflation rate jumped to 35%, real wages fell by 35%, unemployment jumped from 3.9% to 7.9%, and infant mortality rates spiked from 5% to 12% all in just 1 year (1995).
This was a straight up economic collapse that made cartel employment (or hopping the border) enticing
No? There are countries that are far more unequal. Even US is higher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_Coefficient_of_Wealt...
I don’t see your point.
False. The US just deployed spy planes to Mexico in the last couple of months after approval by Mexico. Doing so without their permission would have been an act of war.
A simple google search can show articles from the era.
The CIA operated as a rogue organization for many decades and that has been curtailed in the last couple of decades. As a side note I am still of the opinion that is who actually created bitcoin and what replaced the drug money which I am in support of as there are less lives lost and they just get the desperate people. That should significantly reduce their dependency on South America as a source of income but now I am delving into whacky-ping-pong-ding-dong conspiracy theories.
Also, the Colombian Cartels are a different set of organizations that have different origins from the Mexican Cartels - the former being a side effect of the Colombian Civil War and the latter being a side effect of the 1990s Peso Crisis and the mass layoffs in the Mexican Army and Petrochemicals industry
Read or watch "100 Years of Solitude" by Gabriel García Márquez. The fissures of the 1899-1903 Colombian Civil War (4-10% of Colombians died) were never resolved and it morphed into "La Violencia" which then morphed into the ongoing Colombian conflict.
You need money to buy weapons, so Colombian insurgent groups (right and left leaning) entered the drug trade to arm themselves - especially after the USSR reduced funding in the 70s-80s to concentrate on Afghanistan.
You see the same dynamics in Afghanistan, Syria, and Myanmar.
This is not the case. The US intelligence has been deploying forces in Latin America against cartels for long long time.
Mexico withheld permission for American military and intelligence deployments from 1990 to 2025 (DEA and other law enforcement was allowed), but they changed recently.
> The parent claimed that this has never happened before because it would have been considered an act of war.
Because it has never happened before in Mexico. It has been political suicide to even consider allowing foreign troops in Mexico because of the memory of the French Occupation.
You cannot treat "Latin America" as a monolith. Each country has a different sociopolitical background and history.
[0] - https://www.southcom.mil/About/History/SOUTHCOMs-60th-Annive...
But let's not fool ourselves. These are American operations taking place in Mexican soil (with the cooperation of the Mexican forces of course, it was not an attack against Mexico).
All including dea with intel and actual boots in Mexico.
The semantics comment was on the point that this is not technically the US military. Sure it is not the military it just has access to its personel and equipment.
It does not have access to the same equipment or (more critically) personel - especially in intelligence, as intelligence ops were not allowed either until the Sheinbaum admin.
I love mexico btw
Let's see if the EU is as concerned about the environmental impact of all those tanks that they are building.
EU did wanted and tried to cooperate in win-win setup with America, it is America who decided they want to attack former allies.
For the military industry part, I completely agree. This applies already to certain war situations that were and keep being encouraged.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
The alternative is an Anglo-French nuclear strike. The tanks are a lot less environmentally damaging, relatively speaking.
I just love when developed countries (mine included) that have already cut down most of their forest cover get all in arms when a developing country wants to improve it's economy at a cost of cutting down some of their forests.
I'm just pointing out that this trade isn't really unusual, there's the typical tradeoffs involved.
Unless you mean let them decide on whether a tariff should hinder their competition, in which case hell no don't let any industry be in charge of their own protections.
If you’re optimizing for the free flow of goods: zero out the tariffs. You can do this unilaterally, even if the counterparty nation doesn’t reciprocate.
If you want to protect an industry, then adjust tariffs to such a degree that the counterparty nation is either not favored or disfavored in pricing.
If you want to punish the counterparty nation, zero out trade and/or blockade the nation, or otherwise prevent its most valuable resources from coming to market.
What you don’t need to do at any step or point of this process is to try and think at a “higher level” about what’s best for California farmers in terms of what they ought to be doing with their land instead. The California agricultural industry is already the largest, most valuable, most lucrative and most diverse in the nation. It’s got plenty of cash crops, of which avocados are just one. If you’re eyeballing agricultural reforms, start with the subsidies that encourage much of the other 49 States to continue their ways as corn and soybean republics.
Also, the "9 pounds of avocados a year" is about 27 avocados/year, or about one avocado every two weeks. Sounds a lot less spectacular. Of course, what we really need to know is many Olympic swimming pools all those avocados would fill.
Yes, which is why this looks like an ad or planted story.
"We have developed such a voracious appetite for this versatile fruit that the U.S. now annually brings in nearly 3 billion pounds of avocados."
These consecutive sentences each state as fact an opposite causality.
How can the central thesis of the article be so confused?
High appetite -> lots of fruit imported -> consumption "explodes"
You can't consume what you don't have, so if they're not growing enough then they have to import them before they can be eaten.
Both importing and consumption are downstream of high demand, but consumption is downstream of high importing.
High appetite for avocados is the reason. Maybe combined with reasonable prices or some other factors. Importing them simply makes it possible for those purchase numbers to get that high. Means. If US would grow them in huge quantities on their own soil it would also allow for the same outcome. So how it is the reason?
My English ain't amazing, I know, but when I read "old school press" it makes me thing: am I so dumb, or are they deliberately using confusing phrasing to sound smarter than it's actually required?
Importing them from Mexico lets consumers have a good quality avocado at a low price. Offering someone a good deal raises demand for that deal relative to offering them fewer, lower-quality eaches at a higher price.
> (Question in title:) Why America now eats a crazy number of avocados
> (Answer in article:) And the reason avocados have exploded in the U.S. is that most of them are no longer grown in the U.S.
How does that make any sort of sense? You could say "it's because they've become very cheap", sure. But if they were grown outside US, and at higher prices, would you accept that as a valid "reason why avocado consumption has exploded"? It would imply that americans must actively hate domestically-grown avocados, with passion.
> the average water use would go up "because" it was coming from someplace other than your village's small oasis
No, absolutely not. It would go up, in your example, because it was more readily available. The source has nothing to do with it except indirectly - the availability has everything to do with it.
I do not think this follows. Some boomer oped writers blaming avocado toasts for young poverty does not imply there is causality between the two. Some boomers love to blame whatever is new for them and they do not bother to check prices or actual levels of consumption.
As in, whatever avocados young people were eating and buying, the expense is unlikely to be comparable with the cost of housing, education, healthcare (if they have health issues already) etc.
When you remove a barrier to a market the intersection of supply and demand curves shifts to the right (more supply) and the equilibrium price drops and the equilibrium supply increases. “Why does this happen?” is more correctly explained by “the supply increased” because the supply curve is what changed, not the demand curve. Note that the article argues for a subsequent change in the demand curve, fueled by tax-funded advertising.
The article seems to do a pretty good job of telling the story. It's not terribly interesting. The big consortium of Mexican avocado growers made a giant push probably around 2015-2016 and dumped a ton of money into American and Canadian markets to sell avocados. It makes sense. California can grow them just fine, but so can Mexico.
I think the more interesting aspect is that, considering how resource intensive they are, it might even be a legitimate good trade case, especially considering the size of the American/Canadian buying population versus the contention in viable domestic production area. This could be (or, really, has been) a very happy arrangement.
I worked on some agave projects around the same time, so I watched on the sidelines while this was going on and knew some people working on the Avocados from Mexico brand. That part was pretty interesting, too, because it was a state-level initiative.
of all the Tariff hit products this is probably the fastest of any of them to do what a Tariff is meant to do... Make the product attractive enough to produce locally unattractive to import.
if growers trust that Trump is consistent and reliable enough to stick to his guns around tariffs (and he hasnt been to date, so thats a real leap of faith), then Avocados will be one of the first products that we'll see the effect of his Tariffs paying dividends to america.
most the other industries and products take a lot longer than 4-5 years to "flip the switch" and start producing locally in numbers large enough to counter the imported numbers.
I haven't seen him do much to bolster that industry other than the tariff... so it may never kick off. What might happen is the "Fad" for avo products might just die off and by 4-5 years comes around it might not be a product in demand anymore.
Edit: oh also, 25% tariff might not BE ENOUGH of a price increase to affect the import numbers at all as well... its hard to know what the final straw is, in the consumer space. They can be fickle buggers.
Kinda looks like click bait generally. Per-capita US avocado consumption is about 9 lbs./y. That's a bit more than 1 per month of the large Mexican avacados. Somehow that's "crazy!!1"
You would think there would be some joy for all this: something Americans will happily eat that isn't "ultraprocessed" and/or meat, and a Mexican product that isn't narcotics or fossil fuel. But no. omg they're so "resource intensive!"
Luxury anxieties, safely ignored.
Wow, just searching around, I found that I'm not the only one! It seems to be Haas vs. Booth...
https://www.reddit.com/r/VietNam/comments/uw10hw/in_the_west...
Hass are definitely superior, but Shepard aren’t all that bad. Bit rubbery maybe :)
Once I went to a park and realized the tree at the park was a (regional) avocado tree. But the avocados were REALLY high up. Like, there was no way we were gonna climb that sucker. So I knocked on a door that was right by the park, and I asked the young girl who answered if she had a stick or something we could use.
She said "actually, we do" and she brought out this insanely long stick with a little forked part at the edge that was just for picking avocados. And we picked so, so many.
You have all type of versions. Some are better to be eaten as guacamole... others are not. Here we do sweet avocados (just eat with sugar, or just put on a blender with milk).
Some of them have more fat, others have less...
Search for "Abacate pescoço". This is probably the most interesting and different one.
:)
I believe Hass is just better to export, because it doesn't spoil so easily.
Another fun fact: I think majority of people don't really buy avocados in supermarket. They are grown all over the place. Streets, backyard, parks... In my street there's like, 5 avocados trees (with each being different type). Hass is the most rare here, you'll usually find it on supermarket only...
I've just given up on avocados, I'll have to wait for a trip to Mexico or the US.
I read somewhere that Denmark is the country with the highest food prices in Europe, but we also spend the least on food. That's just a winning combination right there.
Neighbour Sweden has pretty great prices for that latitude.
You make it sound nefarious, and maybe it is with farmed salmon.
Are there similar concerns with Hass avocados?
I'm not OK with this. I know the amount is tiny, but it's the principle of the thing, the US government should not be in the business of promoting stuff like this. That an inappropriate use of government.
I live in a former Avocado farm that was subdivided into homes after NAFTA made US production less viable after Mexico undercut our labor. It was a 50 year old industry and local jobs that was wiped out with free trade. It wasn't a win win.