'Enormous' profits from avocado exports drive deforestation, water shortages in Mexico

Demand in the United States for one popular food is driving deforestation in Mexico. Daniel Wilkinson, senior policy adviser at Climate Rights International, joins Stephanie Sy to discuss the environmental and human costs of skyrocketing avocado sales and what can be done to address the issue.

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John Yang : Demand in the United States for one popular food is driving deforestation in Mexico. Stephanie Sy speaks with a researcher about what can be done to stop it.

Stephanie Sy : Green Gold, midshipman’s butter, the alligator pair, or as most of us know it, the avocado. It’s become a staple in a lot of our diets, and in recent years, sales have skyrocketed. The U.S. alone imports around 80 percent of Mexico’s crop. That’s $3 billion of avocados.

But the growing demand for avocados on toast in guac is having a steep environmental and human cost. Daniel Wilkinson is Senior Policy Advisor at Climate Rights International. Daniel, thanks so much for joining us.

You have this report out about the avocado industry in Mexico. It’s called Unholy Guacamole. How much first of all, has demand for avocados grown in recent years in this country and around the world?

Daniel Wilkinson, Climate Rights International : Well, it’s been skyrocketing. The consumption of avocados in the U.S. has tripled since 2020 and we also see similar sort of growth in Europe and in other markets around the world.

Stephanie Sy : So as a result of that, I understand that over 25,000 acres of land in Mexico has been illegally deforested for avocado production. Explain what is happening and why enforcement measures aren’t in place.

Daniel Wilkinson : Well, what’s happening is that there are enormous profits to be made selling avocados to the U.S. market, and so people are clearing forests illegally to install avocado orchards. There’s some estimates as much as 70,000 acres just in the last decade, and there’s many more, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of acres of forest land currently standing but that are at risk of clearing.

The deforestation is almost entirely illegal, and much of the water use as well is unauthorized. It’s basically water theft which is also illegal, but the laws simply are not being enforced. The perpetrators, the people who are profiting off this, are not being held to account.

And there’s no shortage of Mexican officials at the local level, at the federal level, who want to do the right thing, who want to enforce these laws. But if they try to enforce the laws, they themselves are exposed to intimidation, sometimes acts of violence, and at the end of the day, they find that they just can’t compete with the enormous economic incentive, the profits that are to be made selling avocados in the United States.

Stephanie Sy : There’s a confluence of environmental problems from this, not just deforestation, but the report also talks about how it exacerbates existing water scarcity in that area.

Daniel Wilkinson : So forests play a very important role in replenishing the aquifer, the water underground in a watershed, you cut down the trees, and you deplete the water that’s there underground, and then you install avocados, which is a plant that consumes as much as four or five times as much water as the natural vegetation.

And the result of all this is very serious water shortages in avocado region that’s having a real impact on local communities, on local farmers, and is simply not sustainable.

Stephanie Sy : That demand, because it comes from the U.S., begs the question, what can we as American consumers of avocados do, and what can U.S. lawmakers do, if anything, to address these issues?

Daniel Wilkinson : Consumers right now can’t really do much, unfortunately. If you buy avocados in the United States, nine out of 10 times it’s coming from Mexico and the companies that are making those avocados available, the importers, the distributors, the supermarkets, simply have not been taking the steps necessary to make sure the avocados that they’re buying are not coming from the orchards with illegal deforestation, but are coming from orchards from law abiding farmers.

So in that context, there’s not much consumers can do, but it really does not have to be like this. If you go to any supermarket in the United States, you’ll see on those avocados stickers that say avocados from Mexico. And if they have the cartons that the avocados came in, which they often do under the display, the carton will have an 11 digit number, which indicates the specific orchard that in Mexico that the avocado came from.

Now, what we did our organization, Climate Rights International, was get access to all those codes for all 50,000 orchards that are certified to export to the United States, and uploaded them just onto Google Earth, and using that, we were able to see which ones were on recently deforested land.

It’s something that I wouldn’t expect your average consumer to do, but there’s no reason that the major supermarket chains can’t do what, what our organization did. But if we really want to eliminate this incentive, we what’s needed is regulatory action to basically bar the sale of avocados from the orchards on recently deforested land. And this is an idea that’s been put out there by Mexican officials. There’s been some interested in this in Washington. This is something that could be done, and we’re hoping that it will be done.

Stephanie Sy : That is Daniel Wilkinson at Climate Rights International. Thanks so much.

Daniel Wilkinson : Thank you, Stephanie.