How to clean up your Super Bowl guacamole
We don’t mean to spoil the party, but there’s an environmental downside to the estimated 105 million pounds of avocados used for Super Bowl party guacamole. Approximately 80% 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.
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.
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 in Michoacán and neighboring Jalisco over the past decade. Daniel Wilkinson, a policy adviser at Climate Rights International, 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.
The way to prevent further destruction of the forests 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% 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. Last week, 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. 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. Deforestation is a complex challenge, but this regulatory fix seems like low-hanging fruit.