We don’t mean to spoil the party, but — there’s an environmental downside to it. Approximately 80 percent of all avocados consumed in the United States come from Mexico. Many of them, unfortunately, are grown on land illegally cleared of forests in the states of Michoacán and Jalisco. (Most of the rest comes from California.) So if you’re tucking into chips and guac on Super Bowl Sunday, you are probably unwittingly contributing to deforestation in western Mexico. Fortunately, there’s a relatively straightforward regulatory proposal before the Biden administration, which, if adopted, could allow U.S. consumers to indulge their taste for avocado, and Mexican producers to profit from it, without further harm to fragile ecosystems.
To be sure, U.S. imports of Mexican avocados demonstrate the power of free trade. Avocado exports from Mexico to the United States have grown from virtually zero in 1997, when the United States lifted a long-standing ban, to $2.5 billion in the 2022-2023 season. Savvy marketing strategies have helped quadruple per capita U.S. consumption since 2000; it now stands at roughly 9 pounds per person per year. Michoacán’s avocado orchards employ 310,000 people, and the industry supports another 78,000 jobs upstream, according to Mexican government figures.
And yet feeding this booming demand has come at an environmental price. Avocado orchards accounted for about one-fifth of the deforestation in Michoacán between 2001 and 2017. Growers have cut down or burned pines and oyamel fir trees from at least 40,000 and maybe more than 70,000 acres — equivalent to the area of more than 50,000 football fields — in Michoacán and neighboring Jalisco over the past decade. Daniel Wilkinson, a policy adviser at Climate Rights International, an advocacy group for the environment and human rights, which did an exhaustive investigation of Mexico’s avocado crop late last year, said virtually none of the groves that replaced forests over the past two decades are legal. They lack state authorization for “land use change.”
Land invasions are common, as is water theft to irrigate thirsty trees. Indigenous activists resisting expanding avocado production on communal lands have been beaten, kidnapped and killed. The avocado business has been heavily infiltrated by organized crime, which charges farmers for protection and controls growers’ access to packing plants. The report from Climate Rights International points to Mexican government data indicating that big U.S. food distributors buy avocados from illegally deforested land and sell them to virtually all the major supermarket chains. The association of Mexican avocado exporters did not respond to requests for comment; nor did the main lobby group for Mexican avocados in the United States and two of the biggest U.S. importers.
The way to prevent further destruction of the forests — which are also the winter homes of millions of monarch butterflies — is to expand the Agriculture Department’s existing process for certifying Mexican avocado imports so that it ensures the fruit doesn’t come from illegally cleared land. The USDA already deploys up to 100 agents to check for pests in about 50,000 avocado orchards, as part of an agreement between the two governments. In Michoacán, 85 percent of the growing area is certified. It would be relatively straightforward to have the same agents also verify the lands’ legal status.
Mexican environmental officials already proposed such a strategy to the USDA in 2021. Yet Washington hasn’t taken up their suggestion. On Wednesday, a group of U.S. senators led by Peter Welch (D-Vt.) sent a letter to the U.S. trade representative, Katherine Tai, and the secretaries of state and agriculture, Antony Blinken and Tom Vilsack, suggesting expanding U.S. certification to combat illegal deforestation in Mexico’s avocado industry. The Mexican government’s buy-in would be critical, so that U.S. officials are not intimidated as they inspect avocado growers.
Even if the United States forbade only future illegal deforestation, it would eliminate avocado growers’ incentive to cut down more trees and burn through more forests — and give packers and distributors an incentive to ensure the provenance of their avocados is legit. Deforestation is a complex challenge, but this regulatory fix seems like low-hanging fruit.
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