US importers sued for 'greenwashing' Mexican avocados | Hacker News Reader

US importers sued for 'greenwashing' Mexican avocados

civileats.com

50 pointsgmays84 comments

As a reminder the Cartels are heavily involved in Mexican avocado production, and regularly commit what would be considered war crimes or crimes against humanity for a nation in their power struggles.

And as a reminder the Cartels are funded by the CIA.

Political groups are the cartels, what we know as cartels are their customer service employees.

The biggest proof is the consistent unwillingness of governments to stop them in any effective way, and I'm not talking about drugs only.

Sure, but at this point apparently so is everyone?

Are you going to eat or not?

I don't eat Mexican avocados, I buy the more expensive ones grown in the US because of the cartels.

I don't think US American avocado farmers are committing war crimes.

Illegal labor? And if you listen to the current administrations apparent stances on it, give it a year for the war crimes part.

"I'm not a bad person, I just indirectly finance brutal cartels".

But US-farmed avocados are the alternative to cartel-financing avocados. Am I missing something?

That the US funds brutal cartels?

US avocado farmers don't, though (unless I've got the wrong farmers in mind).

And I think that’s why the parent used the word “indirectly”.

By supporting US industry you are indirectly supporting the US government and its actions, because those taking part in commerce in America pay taxes which support the US government. If you believe the US governments actions to be illegal or immoral then supporting US farmers would not offer a material difference to supporting Mexican farmers who themselves (it is alleged here without sources) are made to contribute towards the cartels.

Maybe that is what the parent meant, but that definition really dilutes the idea of responsible vs irresponsible choices to the point of meaninglessness, IMO.

Donating to a food bank lowers the taxpayer burden of paying for food, and American taxes fund cartels, so you're very indirectly funding cartels when you donate to a food bank.

I'm not sure that would influence any reasonable person's actions in any meaningful way, though.

But isn’t your assertion equally indirect?

“I don’t buy from Mexican farmers because they are extorted by cartels and forced to give them money which they in turn use to fund activities I don’t approve of”

“I don’t buy from American farmers because they are extorted by the government and forced to give them money which they in turn use to fund activities I don’t approve of”

Notably, #2 is essentially the basis for sanctions against a specific country (Iran, Russia, etc.)

Question for those currently living in the USA. How much do you pay for Hass avocados?

At Lidl in Poland, 2x (perfectly ripe, in a box) Hass can be currently purchased for ~$2.50. This blew my mind when I first saw it, coming from Seattle a few years ago. I believe they are all grown in the EU, in Spain.

In the California Bay Area, We don't have avocados in a box, nor perfectly ripe. They are usually in a pile and quite un-ripe (which helps reduce denting in the pile). Depending on size, quality, and organic status they range from about ~1 to ~2.50 each.

You can also buy a full flat of medium size avocados at a Costco Business center for $26 for 35 avocados. They are "stage 2" ripened, which means they will be usable in about 1-2 days on the counter. I buy one and then put them carefully in the fridge and take out about 3-4 at a time. This way I can have fresh ripe avocados for about a month.

This joke I saw on Reddit about avocado ripeness says it all IMO:

avocado: not ripe

avocado: I'M RIPE NOW

avocado: OK you were in the bathroom so I rotted

I cannot relate to this. I buy a bag of unripe (hard) avocados every 3 days or so from Costco, and they take about 2 to 5 days to ripen on the countertop, and then I put them in the fridge and they are good for another 5 days.

This is my method too. I check them once a day and once they are just a little soft and most of the green is gone, I pop them in the fridge and they are ripe for about a week.

"In the California Bay Area, We don't have avocados in a box, nor perfectly ripe. They are usually in a pile and quite un-ripe (which helps reduce denting in the pile). Depending on size, quality, and organic status they range from about ~1 to ~2.50 each."

Same in the Chicagoland area.

Driving through the Central Valley I’ve seen signs for 10 for $1. No idea if they are extra small, but typically it’s $1-$2.50 per

These are small. But delicious.

In the SF Bay Area, I pay anywhere from $1-$2 per avocado at most places. I've occasionally gotten them at Farmers markets here too, where they have a nice selection depending on desired ripeness/freshness, but its very seasonal.

I have started growing my own (Wurtz aka "Little Cado", a compact self-fertile variety) - in year 3 I have about a half dozen fruits growing!

There's a very wide range (depending on location, season, size, quality), but in NYC I expect to pay about $1 to $1.50 an avocado.

OK, that is much less expensive than I expected.

Oh, and I should have been more clear. These are "perfectly ripe, in a box" fancy style. Edited gp.

NY is famous for cheap fruit at the street level. That's the advantage of being a port city. Go somewhere like small town Iowa if you are looking for high-priced avocados.

That's interesting. The price I gave above is from very much the EU equivalent of "small town Iowa." Distance to cities, farmers, and all.

Price primarily varies based on size. Small avocados sell for $0.99 with regularity, while extra large ones may be $2.50 each.

That's what I was trying to compare. These are perfect large and ripe Hass in my original comment.

Might I ask, where do you see those prices?

Just at the local Safeway

> Seattle

4 for 5$ at costco, if I remember correctly.

Avocados have long been sold in bags of quantity 5 at Costco, and prices have been at least $9 per bag in WA state, if not $10 and $11 for the past year or two.

Used to be $6 or $7 for 5 avocados around 2020. You can see in store prices in the Costco app now. Currently, the Kirkland, WA Costco says $9 for 5 avocados.

I stand corrected then, might have mixed them with the small ones from trader joes

I wasn't a Costco shopper. More of a QFC dude. But are those fancy "perfect" Hass?

If so, I wonder if I created a false memory based on the whole "skip avocado toast" meme, or something.

Skipping avocado toast isn't about not buying avocados and bread and making a delicious snack for ~ $1 or $2. It's about not paying $12[1] to have once slice of bread and two or three slices of avocado at a restaurant.

[1] Prices have probably gone up, maybe avocado toast at a restaurant is $20 now?

Yeah, I understand the restaurant part. Still, we are all easily programmed meat machines, at least I am. I would not put it past my mind to have blurred those things together into a false memory of some sort.

Also, your username does indeed check out.

___

Complete tangent about cooking at home, and the glorious results of iteration on one's own:

I recently realized that my charcoal BBQ chicken was never ideal, and I'd really prefer to eat more chicken than beef or pork. The outside 5mm of my chicken might be perfect, but then the core was still tough. By the time it was all cooked through properly, the whole thing was dry as heck.

My "innovation:" I marinade de-boned leg meat for 24hrs in a jerk-type sauce and mixed herbs. I caramelize the outside of the chicken over hot coals, maybe 7 to 9 minutes per side. Then, I put each piece of chicken on a thick piece of aluminum foil, and put 1 to 2 tablespoons of water over it. Then I carefully fold 3 sides of the aluminum foil into a type of envelope, and put it back on the bbq for maybe even >20 mins. There should be no easy air leaks in the envelope. It blows up like a balloon when cooking.

The result is better chicken than I've had anywhere outside of an Ethiopian restaurant. It has caramelization, and also falls apart when you look at it.

I am truly addicted. It rained the other day, and I figured out how to make this in the oven on broil, and then in a dutch oven, with the oven appliance on low-med for 30 mins.

I used to eat out a lot, and chicken-wise it was mostly terrible compared to this. I wasted so many meals and so much money.

There's nary a cooking tip to be found on HN, but this felt too good not to share.

same complaint my wife has, why pay 15/20$ for something I can do better at home for less than half?

There have been on-and-shortages, due to complex supply chains and varying crops.

But the avocado toast was more about overpaying for well-preserved food in trendy cafes. In America, you're almost always paying way more for labor and overhead than for supplies.

Yes, they are Hass. Usually bigger than the ones at Aldi or equivalent cheaper store. Obviously not Avozilla size or anywhere near it (unfortunately).

$1-1.50 at the grocery in SoCal, ripeness may vary. If you go to the farmers market in the summer you can get much better cultivars around 3 for $5. Hass are ok, but Fuerte, Bacon and Reed are easily available and mich tastier.

https://imgur.com/a/Ay9a8Su

I paid $0.65 each last week at Aldi in NY.

About $.85 on the east coast. Not perfectly ripe and tend to loose 10-20% to damage.

Something like only 6% of imported produce is inspected (although I've read that 98% isn't).

I've been back-chair commenting for years: wait until all the Whole Foods shoppers find out their favorite South American-Foo actually isn't organic. This seems like a variation on this.

New Zealand grows avocados sustainably and ethically and exports to USA. If you're interested in buying ethical fruit.

> “Regulatory oversight and validation of good practices are very difficult to document for compliance over the border,” he noted, “They are of course done much better here. And there are validated and official fair market agreements between wholesalers and retailers that require documentation and compliance.”

This is such a bullshit excuse (on the industry's part, to be clear, not the person speaking). If we cared to validate supply chains, it would be done, for this and everything else. We don't because the people in power do not want to know. They don't want to know how greenwashed avocados are, they don't want to know how many diamonds come from conflict zones, they don't want to know how much of their lithium was mined by kids, and all the rest.

We know how to solve these problems and we're choosing not to, and not only are we maintaining harms done overseas in the process, we're also destroying the ability for domestic producers of... everything, really, to compete in the market too.

But the lines gotta go up, so on we go.

You seem to have a very cynical view, but I think the reason nobody is verifying these things is that they're hard to actually check, and nobody wants to pay for the cost of verification. My only experience with this sort of tracking is compliance with "Conflict Minerals" reporting, and from that I can tell you that tracking and verifying the origin of any commodity or bulk good is nearly impossible to accomplish reliably. There is no real way to know where a refined metal came from, other than accepting a supplier's assurance, and maybe looking through some documents, looking for obvious mistakes. I have to imagine that avocados are similar.

I'm so tired of this.

Here, watch this: I'm the US government with the most powerful military and surveillance network on the planet with multiple deployed floating cities. You give me a list of every supplier you use and I will recursively go down that list and every employee they have and if you use slaves to harvest materials at any point, I shut down your entire business and burn every shippng crate of stock until you get a supplier that doesn't use slaves. If you lie, I ship the executives to one of numerous black sites under my control. If we're going to do it to innocent people, shipping them to God knows what death camp without due process, I'm not going to sit here and listen anymore about this "we can't do that" nonsense about our supply chain.

Woah, crazy, slavery solved.

At least have the balls to tell me you want cheap avocados and don't care if child slaves pick them. I'm so God damn tired of all the excuses and smoke and mirrors.

Let’s say you buy electrolytic capacitors, and you’re worried that they might have conflict tantalum in them. You call up the manufacturer (likely Samsung), and they tell you that they are unable to verify the origin of the metal. Even if they did tell you who sold them the metal, that’s just a refiner, and there is no way to verify whatever they tell you about the origin. Many conflict metals are laundered through other countries, and I am not sure how you’d detect that.

I understand your frustration, but how do you actually verify the origins of these commodities? The professional auditors just blindly trust documentation as far as I can tell.

Then why the fuck are you buying them from there? Get a different supplier. If they can't answer that question, it's because they do use slave labor or just don't care. Neither is acceptable.

I'm sorry, are you okay if you asked your boss "hey, we don't have actual slaves in the basement, right?" And they answer "I don't know?" I hope to God you would call the police. But suddenly it's acceptable because a CEO says "maybe, but it saves us 5¢ per unit and they're just brown people in another country"?

I'm not going to boohoo for poor little victim companies because they just need slave labor because they're too stupid or greedy to not buy from a company who can't say "no slavery is used in making my product".

"Oh no, I want to make shirts, but all the cotton I'm willing to pay for comes from slave plantations." Then don't make shirts. And if you do, that makes you a slaver too.

I love how this is where the conversation is these days. This is how far the Overton window has shifted. Slavery is totally acceptable as long as you pretend you don't know. Fix it? Stop slavery? That's just too hard and we may lose profits. "Oh no, poor little us, it's impossible for us to actually care about human rights."

So your solution is that purchasers just need to buy from someone who tells them that the commodity is clean? That is definitely what many do, and what the conflict minerals regulations have encouraged companies to do, but I don’t trust any unverifiable information.

My point is that these companies know that slavery is being used. Nestlé quite literally admitted to it!

If we're going to be a fascist dumpster, why does everyone pretend it's some inherent right that the corporate wigs get all this insulation and that there's simply nothing that can be done against quite literally the worst crimes against humanity that we could possible participate in?

The literal bare minimum someone can do is get a written affidavit from their supplier that the chain is clean. I'm a stupid individual man and somehow I can take the extra hours required for damn near every purchase to look up who I'm buying from and where it comes from. Sometimes I even go without! But companies worth quite literally tens of billions can't?

If all you have to do is get written affidavits, you’ll just create an industry of co-minglers and liars abroad, without changing anything. I don’t think this is a readily solveable problem.

Then you make it illegal to do business with countries that don't have an extradition treaty for slavery!

I cannot fathom this mindset. This is human slavery! This is worse than murder and rape and child endangerment, because it inherently includes all of them! It is the worst crime you can commit onto another human being for decades and decades as you drive them into the grave. I've seen a picture of a man looking at the severed hands of his daughter for bananas! But you're willing to handwaved it away like it's a minor inconvenience?

As if a country that is currently demanding OpenAI give them every chat they've ever had, including deleted, a country that has every phone call and text ever made, that has privileged access to emails and photo clouds and search engines for monitoring, that runs countless poisoned exit nodes and honey potted websites, which infiltrates domestic and foreign cults and rings and governments with spies regularly, that publishes papers on how to spy on citizens walking through their homes via wireless signals and hear audio through hard surfaces by using vibrations in leaves, that operates military cities and steers security standards and has quite literally unlimited money for their war machine, which can track individual human activity from space can't find out if millions to billions of pounds of materials going through their ports being inspected by their customs with manifest signed by domestic companies with paperwork uses slavery!?

Oh, come on. When it's about SpaceX taking humans to Mars we're all "we do these things because they are hard" but when it comes to ending the most abhorrent crimes against humanity of our times you throw up your hands and declare "the billionaires told me it was hard"!?

> If we're going to be a fascist dumpster, why does everyone pretend it's some inherent right that the corporate wigs get all this insulation and that there's simply nothing that can be done against quite literally the worst crimes against humanity that we could possible participate in?

I mean, historically, Fascists and Capitalists have been pretty hand-in-hand so that's far from even strange to me. Despite the Nazi party having Socialist in it's name, they literally coined the term "privatization" to describe their process of selling public-good utilities and services to private owners so they could profit off of them.

Cosigned 100%.

The only thing I would say is don't burn the shipping crates. That's just wasteful. Sell the products at 50% off retail to everyone in the US below the poverty line first, then everyone else, and use the funds to pay to improve the working conditions overseas. Our atmosphere doesn't need more waste in it.

> My only experience with this sort of tracking is compliance with "Conflict Minerals" reporting, and from that I can tell you that tracking and verifying the origin of any commodity or bulk good is nearly impossible to accomplish reliably.

This is a better written and more eloquent version of the same excuse I was ranting about in my comment. And I'm afraid my response is not as eloquent:

Bull. Shit.

This is an eminently solvable issue. Make the executives of whatever corporation personally, criminally responsible for the slavery found in their supply chain, and then: Watch the problem be solved. No, I don't know the specifics of how you do it. That's not my job. But we put men on the moon, for Christ's sake. We, creatures not gifted by nature with wings, have the ability to fly at (mostly) reasonable cost, to such a degree where the inconveniences involved in it make it boring to discuss. Everyone in the west moves around in metal boxes with smaller metal boxes within them in which we blow up fuel and air in precise mixes to travel upwards of 80 mph, largely safely. You're telling me the collected knowledge of our species cannot be leveraged to make sure that little kids aren't doing resource extraction!?

> and nobody wants to pay for the cost of verification.

THAT is the real problem, and that's also solvable by the above. I bet the executives at these companies will open the business's purse REAL FAST when it's their, actual physical ass on the line, and not just a paltry fine and firm finger-wagging from the Government.

In reply to the comment below:

> But how do you actually verify the source? Let’s assume that some amount of conflict metals are laundered through other countries, and commingled with ‘clean’ material (which is usually how it happens); how do you figure out whether your supplier is using this material? Do you just trust any documentation they provide? If not, what is it that you’d do?

I mean this is actually one application of crypto that I didn't think was brain-dead stupid. I read a paper about the potential of using blockchains to verify the integrity of materials in supply chains.

More to the point though: I said, I don't know how it's done. But I guaran-damn-tee you that if the corpos will be charged, legally, personally, for the finding of slavery in supply chains, that they will figure it out and fucking quick.

And, even moreso, once you raise the consequences of those "lapses" in ethics to such a degree, it's highly probable that the dubious sources will either improve or shut down entirely, because there will be no corporation in the West ready to do business with them anymore. The risk is simply too high for those in charge of said corporations. They will pay whatever it costs to have materials that are from properly vetted sources.

And of course, I'm not a child, there will still be issues, none of this is a silver bullet for any of it, and there will always be bad actors acting badly. However we still have murders, and we don't just... fine murderers $500 and tell them they better not do it again, despite the fact that we can't catch them all. We catch them and we punish them.

> No, I don't know the specifics of how you do it.

HN had four stories of the US government violating the 4th and 5th amendments for surveillance for CBP and ICE yesterday alone. The President jokes about revoking citizenship, of both natural born and otherwise. We have had dozens of citizens sent to black sites without due process. We are monitoring social media for immigrants while deporting people to illegal death camp prisons in countries they have never been.

The sitting US president is a convicted rapist who attempted to violently overthrow the government 5 years ago. Who is now covering for the leader of the largest, highest-profile child rape program in history - led by one of his best friends! They, this week, published fabricated videos from official government sources. And the SCOTUS has declared him effectively immune from prosecution.

We are so far from pretending to be a country of rules and laws anymore. So, fuck it, just decree it and call them terrorists at this point. Ship the execs to Guantanamo.

But how do you actually verify the source? Let’s assume that some amount of conflict metals are laundered through other countries, and commingled with ‘clean’ material (which is usually how it happens); how do you figure out whether your supplier is using this material? Do you just trust any documentation they provide? If not, what is it that you’d do?

The coffee supply chain is one exception imho. There's a market for value-add in the supply chain, I've been amazed to watch the price of specialty coffee keep rising at my favorite roaster.

I mean, if it bothers you, stop buying avocados. I think the truth is that consumers don't want to know either.

Many consumers don't have the time or luxury to know. We're in the "give them bread" phase. We already heavily subsidize many parts of the food chain to keep people happy. Nobody wants to do anything politically that might cause food prices to go up.

That counts as ‘consumers don’t want to know’, considering how obviously grocery stores prices were an issue in the last election.

Assigning a motive where there isn't any is not a great argument.

Pretending there is no motive when there is a plausible one right there isn’t a great argument either.

Yet it's still a better one. It's much more plausible consumers haven't had the exposure and time to form a decision on this than it is to conclude that they don't care.

That's not a solution, it's defeatist horseshit. I want avocados. I don't want avocado growers to be able to hide their environmental impact. I want lithium batteries. I don't want kids mining lithium. I want animal products. I don't want animals needlessly tortured in factory farms.

I don't feel like I'm asking for the fucking moon here.

It's a classic case of revealed vs declared preferences. People overwhelmingly say they want everything ethically sourced, but they reveal that they don't want to pay more for it, which makes ethically sourced anything a luxury good in the cases where it succeeds at all. People want kids out of

At some point IMO people need to grow up and recognize that there's a GULF between the world people say they want, and the one they insist on creating. Assuming that your money follows your stated intentions, you're part of a small minority that truly cares about this to the extent that they're willing to pay for it.

According to the complaint, people, generally, are putting their money where their mouth is, and that the market prices such higher, as one would expect.

The problem is the information asymmetry: a consumer can't know if the word "sustainable" indicates sustainable practices, or is just ink. That's where regulation ought to step in, but of course, waves at current political turmoil…

The last election clearly demonstrated that people wanted BS over reality, eh?

I think this is just an argument for why we should decide what production practices are acceptable for society, impose it, and dole out harsh penalties for cheaters.

If you're going to line your coffers by selling things to us, then we get to decide things like whether you get to use slave labor, whether you get to adulterate it with pollutants, whether you get to lie about its contents, etc.

That way people can pick the cheapest product and receive something that isn't completely horrific. We already kinda have this, but your comment just supports the need for it.

If revealed preference truly didn’t care there wouldn’t be a need to mark the produce as home grown.

It's there for the sub-set of people who truly care, or want to socially signal that they care. It's like... Tony's Chocolonely or any of the fair trade centric chocolates. They exist, they make sales, and you know who blows them out of the water every year? Nestle. Mondelez.

For every person who goes to Whole Foods and checks the labels, there are thousands of people who go to Wal-Mart or Costco and the only thing they check is the price.

If you socially signal that you’ll buy it and you buy it then the declared preference equals the revealed preference.

Tony's Chocoloney had to stop marketing their chocolate as the only chocolate that doesn't use slave labor because they couldn't guarantee it.

Unless you're literally flying over to vet suppliers yourself, there's practically nothing you can do as a consumer to guarantee you're not being lied to.

Frankly, maybe this is an opportunity for an OSINT org. Just as soon as they stop having all these wars of aggression with professional misinformation campaigns to focus on, of course.

Amen. Sadly, it seems next to impossible to bring this sort of change and accountability to industry. In the meantime, our only option is pay premiums (both financially and in effort), which the masses are unable or unwilling to do, in order to opt out of the current system (if it's even possible).

At least you're thinking about the issues, and seem to care, so thanks for that.

But you also want to pay what you have always paid

I'm not OP, but no, I want to pay a fair price for things. I don't mind paying a lot more for avocados if it means no one has to die or be abused to produce them.

Oh, ok. Remind me, what food staples are ethical and healthy?

You can find ethical concerns with anything if you look hard enough. Supermarket foods are not on my list of things I get too wound up about. Yes, the farming practices of developing economies are not congruent with what we in our place of economic dominance and comfort expect, but that's part of "developing." Look at our own, or any first-world country's history.

Feel free to go to the Farmers Market on Saturday and pick up an $8 head of lettuce and some $4/ea heirloom tomatoes if it bothers you.

I mean we used to have a strong Avocado industry here in the states before NAFTA. Which reminds me I have to go cut one of the dead Avocado trees in my back from those days.

The US avocado industry is still pretty strong compared to pre-NAFTA. See Figure 4. It looks like domestic production (in lbs. of avocados) actually peaked in 2005/2006, and nearly reached that level again in 2010/2011.

https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/FE1150

The US loooooves to find excuses to block foreign produce.

When it comes to produce, it routinely finds itself on the protectionist side.

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