Trigger warning: This article contains references to sexual violence in The Human Cost section below.
For some time, the avocado has been the darling of the food movement. Nutritious and delicious, avocados are loved by vegans and omnivores alike—who consume 11 billion pounds of them worldwide each year[1]—not to mention being a trendy symbol of healthy eating. One serving (about one-third of a medium Hass avocado) provides nearly 20 different nutrients, many of which are considered heart healthy, including unsaturated fat, fiber, vitamin K, vitamin E, and potassium.[2] Additional health benefits of this green fruit include antioxidant, anticancer, antidiabetic, antiatherogenic, antihypertensive, anti-inflammatory, and antimicrobial effects.[3]
Unfortunately, avocados might not be as green as they seem—at least from an environmental standpoint: avocados are an especially thirsty crop, for instance, and as demand for this superfood grows, its production has led to deforestation and biodiversity loss. Furthermore, as we have seen with other foods, such as bananas and chocolate, there are additional issues to think about before tucking into your favorite avocado dish.
So, let’s take a closer look at the enormously popular avocado and consider its environmental and social consequences.
Avocado 101
Whether they are mashed onto toast, blended in a smoothie, or added to recipes in dozens of other ways, avocados are as versatile as they are tasty. But they have a distinguished history that reaches well beyond hipster menus and health food stores. Scientists don’t agree on where the avocado originated, but what is certain is that cultures in Mesoamerica have been among the avocado’s most devoted admirers. Archaeologists have discovered evidence of avocados as a crop in Coaxcatlan, Puebla, Mexico, dating back 10,000 years.[4] Avocados can be found in Aztec paintings, on Pacal tombs in Chiapas, and on the Maya calendar, where the fourteenth month (K’ank’in) is represented by the glyph for the avocado.[5] And if you love guacamole, you can thank the Aztecs, who were mixing what they called ahuaca-mulli, or “avocado sauce,” hundreds of years before it became a go-to dip to enjoy during Super Bowl games.[6]
With its oversized seed, however, the avocado is a bit of an evolutionary miracle. The tree from which it comes only grows naturally through seed dispersal, and the megafauna—such as mammoths and giant sloths—who once ate the pear-shaped fruit whole and then deposited the seed during their travels have long since vanished. How the avocado manages to exist in the wild remains a mystery.[7] What has allowed the avocado tree and its fruit to prosper commercially, of course, has been cultivation, which mainly involves rooting avocado cuttings, layering, and grafting.
Hundreds of varieties of avocado trees have been cultivated around the world, though they need tropical and Mediterranean temperatures to thrive. All these trees have their origin in Guatemala, Mexico, or the West Indies.[8] Mexico is by far the largest grower of avocados,[9] and the state of Michoacán, near Mexico City, produces eight out of 10 Mexican avocados and half of all the avocados in the world.[10] The state’s mountainous landscape has an astounding 42,000 avocado orchards located at high elevations, from 2,000 to 10,000 feet.[11] Eighty percent of all avocados consumed in the United States have been imported from Michoacán.[12] (The U.S. has a much smaller avocado industry.)
A big reason for the boom in avocado imports to the U.S. is NAFTA. The North American Free Trade Agreement, which was in effect from 1994 until 2020, was meant to encourage tradeamong Canada, Mexico, and the United States but ended up doing more damage than good. Before NAFTA, the U.S. did not allow fresh avocados from Mexico, allegedly due to concerns that the fruits were infested by insects.[13] After years of negotiations with Mexican officials, the USDA permitted avocados to be imported in 1997. (Unfortunately, NAFTA allowed the U.S. to export cheap corn to Mexico, where farms could not compete with the cut-rate prices and nearly 1.3 million farm workers lost their jobs between 1994 and 2004.[14] Many of these laborers came to the U.S. looking for work.[15])
Annual avocado consumption in the U.S., which was about 1 pound per person in 1989,[16]quadrupled from 2 pounds per person in 2001 to 8 pounds by 2021.[17]
The environmental cost
The meteoric increase in avocado sales has had a serious impact on the planet. Avocado production is highly water-intensive, using an average of 70 liters per avocado, which is more than three times the amount of water needed to grow one orange and 14 times the amount of water to grow a single tomato.[18] (Xavier Equihua, CEO of the World Avocado Organization, argues that most avocado production is irrigated by rainwater.[19]) Avocado production has also caused biodiversity loss,[20] and because they are generally shipped long distances in cold storage, avocados have a rather large carbon footprint.[21]
Growing avocados is so lucrative that farmers cut down older trees and replace them with young avocado trees, draining local water supplies and leading to deforestation.[22] In Michoacán—one of the most important ecosystems in Mexico—farmers have been removing oak and pine trees for avocado orchards at an alarming rate. In 2016, officials estimated the state was losing between 15,000 and 20,000 acres of forest each year due to avocados;[23] in 2021, researchers said the total is closer to 36,000 acres.[24] Among the many species that suffer from this deforestation are monarch butterflies, [25] Mexican environmental inspectors have discovered illegal avocado plantations encroaching on areas of the state set aside to protect the butterflies.[26]
As if all that weren’t bad enough, avocados are also treated as a monoculture crop, which are increasingly reliant on chemical pesticides and fertilizers to reduce production costs.[27] Monoculture crops also absorb all the nutrients from the soil, slowly degrading it year after year.[28] Also impacting the environment are the agricultural chemicals used to keep up with production demands, which harm pollinators, contaminate the subsoil, and leach into waterways.[29]
The human cost
The popularity of avocados has been a mixed blessing for farmers in Mexico, where the fruit is known as oro verde (“green gold”). On one hand, growing avocados is so profitable that a farmer with even a few acres of avocado trees earns enough to send his children to college or to buy a new pickup truck, which is something that no other crop has been able to offer.[30] On the other hand, the economic success of avocado production—valued at US$3 billion annually,[31] ahead of Mexico’s beer and tequila industries—has attracted the attention of the country’s cartels.
These organized crime groups use violence and the threat of violence to get what they want.[32] Their tactics include seizing avocado plantations, cutting down swaths of forest to start their own orchards, and demanding that farmers who own avocado trees pay “protection fees.” Avocado pickers have been forced by cartels to work at gunpoint for no pay, while drivers of avocado-laden trucks have been robbed of their loads.[33] Farmers who resist the cartels have been tortured and killed.[34]
Indeed, anyone who stands up to the cartels is at risk. Among the most gruesome examples are 19 people who were killed in 2019; their bodies were found in locations around the city of Uruapan, Michoacán. Some had been displayed over a bridge as a graphic warning to others who try to oppose the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which took credit for the murders.[35]
The cartels have also allegedly targeted activists working to protect monarch butterflies from encroaching avocado orchards, including the manager of El Rosario Monarch Butterfly Preserve, Homero Gómez González, whose body was discovered about two weeks after he disappeared from the sanctuary in January of 2020.[36]
One group that has been successful in resisting the cartels is the Purépecha peoples of Cherán, Michoacán. In 2011, concerned about corruption and crime—including the illegal logging of forests to make way for avocado orchards—Indigenous women in the community organized a revolt that led to the residents declaring self-rule. They even marched into the local police headquarters and confiscated the officers’ weapons for their own use; the 20 police officers soon left.[37] “We couldn’t trust the authorities or police anymore,” said Josefina Estrada, who helped lead the uprising. “We didn’t feel that they protected us or helped us. We saw them as accomplices with the criminals.”[38] Today Cherán is governed by a council of elders in the Purépecha language, and armed patrols guard the pine-covered hillsides. “The community is the one demanding and asking that we respect nature, just like our ancestors taught us,” said David Ramos Guerrero, a member of Cherán’s self-governing farmers’ board.[39] Guerrero added that farmers in Cherán have agreed to a total ban on commercial avocado orchards. “People are allowed to have three, four or five, or at most 10 avocado plants to supply food, but commercial planting isn’t allowed,” he said.[40]
Avocado production in other locations has drawn attention for human rights abuses as well. The Kakuzi avocado farm, which is located in Kenya but is owned by the British agricultural company Camellia, has been linked to scores of incidents of extreme violence, including beatings, rapes, and murder.[41] In one case, Kakuzi security guards reportedly beat a man to death for stealing an avocado.[42] Women in the local community have come forward detailing how company guards have sexually assaulted them. “I was raped by Kakuzi security guards and it cost me my marriage,” said Marium Wanja, whose husband left her after she bore two children as a result of the assaults.[43]
In Chile, the third-largest exporter of avocados,[44] human rights abuses are buried deep underground. Many owners of avocado plantations in the Chilean town of Petorca have installed illegal pipes to divert water from rivers and aquifers more than 300 feet below the surface, drying up local water supplies and forcing villagers in the drought-prone region to use often-contaminated water delivered by trucks.[45] “Petorca is the national epicenter of the violation of the human right to water,” said Rodrigo Mundaca, leader of the Movement for Defense of Water and Land and Protection of the Environment, calling it “criminal” that 40,000 residents in the province lack running water and must rely on tanker trucks.[46]
Moreover, those who pick and pack avocados face numerous hardships, including difficult working conditions, insufficient pay, lack of health care or benefits, and long hours. Avocado packinghouse workers in Uruapan, Michoacán, for instance, reportedly work 12-hour days for US$130 a week.[47]
Recommendations
RecommendationsWith avocados being labeled “the new blood diamond”[48] due to their unsustainability and threat to human rights (at least for the time being), a consumer boycott of the fruit would seem to be an obvious response. Indeed, many chefs have scratched avocados right off their menus.[49]
Yet the solution is not that simple, and a boycott—if the workers called for it, which is the only way F.E.P. would support a boycott—may actually hurt farmers more than it helps. In Michoacán, for example, 34 percent of the population works in agriculture, and avocado farming provides hundreds of thousands of jobs.[50] A boycott could be economically devastating to an impoverished group that already wants no part of the cartels.
Also keep in mind that farm workers in the U.S. avocado industry earn only about $14.77 per hour (in 2021).[51] And these workers suffer many of the same injustices common among farm workers—most of whom are immigrants—such as prolonged exposure to heat and agricultural chemicals, substandard housing, verbal or physical abuse, and discrimination.[52]
With the many issues surrounding avocados—including the vast amount of water that goes into their production in the U.S.—one step you can take is to reduce your consumption of avocados, and when you do purchase them, support eco-friendly farming by buying organic avocados grown in the U.S. at your local farmers’ market or those imported by Equal Exchange, which launched a small-scale farmer program for Mexican avocados in 2013, to establish a market for small-scale farmers and their produce in the precarious arena of the avocado market.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/avocado-environment-cost-food-mexico/
[2] https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/vegetable-of-the-month-avocado
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/persea
[4] https://www.jstor.org/stable/41761865
[5] https://www.jstor.org/stable/41761865
[6] Sophie D. Coe, America’s First Cuisines (University of Texas Press, 1994), p. 45.
[7] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-the-avocado-should-have-gone-the-way-of-the-dodo-4976527/
[8] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/avocado-types#types
[9] https://apps.fas.usda.gov/newgainapi/api/Report/DownloadReportByFileName?fileName=Avocado%20Annual_Mexico%20City_Mexico_12-01-2021.pdf
[10] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/avocado-environment-cost-food-mexico/
[11] https://avocadoinstitute.org/avo-journey/magic-of-michoacan/magic-of-the-four-blooms/
[12] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/02/15/mexican-avocado-import-ban/
[13] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-01-20-mn-26644-story.html
[14] https://carnegieendowment.org/files/nafta1.pdf
[15] https://www.marketplace.org/2017/03/21/how-nafta-changed-corn-market-and-accidentally-spurred-more-immigration/
[16] https://www.businessinsider.com/why-avocados-are-so-expensive-2019-10
[17] https://www.statista.com/statistics/591263/average-avocado-consumption-us-per-week/
[18] https://danwatch.dk/en/undersoegelse/how-much-water-does-it-take-to-grow-an-avocado/
[19] https://inews.co.uk/news/environment/avocados-green-growers-industry-sustainability-backlash-1320060
[20] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2021/02/04/climate-solutions-avocados/
[21] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/avocado-environment-cost-food-mexico/
[22] https://www.businessinsider.com/ap-mexico-deforestation-for-avocados-much-higher-than-thought-2016-10
[23] https://apnews.com/article/f3077e3318b24e1db1f373ab71043124
[24] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301479720314079
[25] https://www.americanforests.org/article/reforesting-michoacan/
[26] https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-mexico-monarchs-reserve-20180221-story.html
[27] Bruce A. Schaffer, B. Nigel Wolstenholme, and Antony William Whiley, The Avocado: Botany, Production and Uses, second edition (CAB International, 2013), P. 344.
[28] https://youmatter.world/en/definition/soil-erosion-degradation-definition/
[29] https://asparagusmagazine.com/the-story-of-avocado-deforestation-irrigation-pesticides-cancer-farmer-health-mexico-organic-3b392256850e
[30] https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2022/0217/Is-your-guacamole-at-risk-Mexican-avocado-ban-may-curb-supply
[31] https://theconversation.com/how-mexicos-lucrative-avocado-industry-found-itself-smack-in-the-middle-of-gangland-177406
[32] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220225-mexico-s-avocado-heartland-held-hostage-by-drug-violence
[33] https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-11-20/mexico-cartel-violence-avocados
[34] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mexican-cartels-kill-avocado-farmers-to-take-over-trade-in-green-gold-q9khzjndg
[35] https://www.newsweek.com/19-people-have-been-murdered-mexico-cartels-fighting-over-avocado-trade-1453925
[36] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-07-23/did-the-avocado-cartel-kill-mexico-butterfly-king-homero-gomez-gonzalez
[37] https://www.businessinsider.com/mexican-town-rejects-drug-cartels-2014-4
[38] https://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-mexico-cheran-20170710-htmlstory.html#
[39] https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/02/02/this-mexican-town-declared-independence-to-protect-its-forest-from-avocados
[40] https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2022/0131/Why-this-Mexican-town-is-choosing-trees-over-avocados
[41] https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2020/10/12/Tesco-suspends-Kenyan-avocado-supplier-after-rights-abuse-claims?utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=12-Oct-2020#
[42] https://www.kenyans.co.ke/news/58147-briton-tycoon-sued-over-kenyan-avocados-linked-murders
[43] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-57413354
[44] https://industry.nzavocado.co.nz/world-avocado-market/
[46] https://www.laprensalatina.com/thirsty-avocado-trees-worsen-effects-of-drought-on-chilean-agriculture/
[47] https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/farm_labor_and_mexico_export_produce_industry.pdf
[48] https://www.latintimes.com/are-avocados-new-blood-diamond-learn-violent-secret-behind-michoacans-mexican-avocado-market-149408
[49] https://www.ctvnews.ca/lifestyle/enjoy-your-guac-while-you-still-can-why-some-chefs-are-smashing-the-avocado-trend-1.5658204
[50] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2021/02/04/climate-solutions-avocados/
[51] https://seasonaljobs.dol.gov/jobs/H-300-21028-040823
[52] https://clf.jhsph.edu/sites/default/files/2021-05/essential-and-in-_crisis-a-review-of-the-public-health-threats-facing-farmworkers-in-the-us.pdf
