1344: Avocados | Skeptical Sunday

What It Covers

Jordan Harbinger and researcher Jessica Wynne examine the avocado industry's hidden supply chain, tracing how NAFTA's 1997 trade opening transformed Michoacan, Mexico into a cartel-controlled production zone generating 2.5 billion pounds annually, while driving deforestation, water depletion, labor exploitation, and journalist killings across three continents.

Key Questions Answered

• •Cartel economics: When US drug enforcement crackdowns reduced narco-trafficking profits post-NAFTA, cartels diversified into avocados because the crop was nearly as profitable but legally safer. Between 1997 and 2021, Michoacan's avocado industry value grew over 7,000%, making it worth controlling through protection rackets, roadblock taxation, and land seizure via bribery.
• •Consumer price paradox: Avocados remain affordable in US markets precisely because violence and extortion costs are externalized onto Mexican farmers and workers. Economists call this a perverse system — cartel taxation, land grabs, and labor suppression in Michoacan subsidize cheap guacamole at American Super Bowl parties and brunch menus.
• •Deforestation scale: Michoacan lost 700,000 acres of native forest between 2001 and 2018 — roughly 40,000 acres annually — with 80% of orchards planted illegally on cleared land later legalized through cartel bribery. This destroys critical monarch butterfly habitat and eliminates pollinator ecosystems that surrounding legal agriculture depends on to function.
• •Water depletion reality: Producing just two to three avocados requires approximately 300 liters of water. In Chile's Patorca region, rivers disappeared entirely due to avocado irrigation, forcing communities to rely on trucked-in water while orchards received priority access. Peru and Kenya show identical patterns of water depletion tied to export-driven avocado expansion.
• •Fair trade limitations: Fair trade certification provides farmers a guaranteed minimum price plus community premiums — some villages fund schools, healthcare, and cartel-resistant income streams like beekeeping. However, certification costs exclude the smallest, most cartel-vulnerable producers, and most avocados globally carry no certification, making greenwashing by major importers routine and largely unchallenged.