Today, the Los Angeles Times reported that Avocado prices are about to rise. The cause? Well, that’s part of our story today.
The U.S. imports a lot of avocados each year. The leading location to grow avocados is in the Mexican state of Michoacán (west of Mexico City and south of Guadalajara). Well, that region of Mexico is home to some of the largest drug and arms cartels in Central America. And the Cartels, just like the Mafiosa, are always looking for a way to make a buck.
After the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, business from Mexico to the U.S. started booming. The cartels began charging $50 per hectare per month for ‘protection’. Oddly enough, many of the growers prefer paying the cartels over paying the Mexican government a tax to provide police service against theft, sabotage, and lobbying over water rights. The cartels also help to provide food and clothing for the worker’s families.
But, as you can imagine, the cartels influence doesn’t just stop there. They keep pushing the growers to cut corners to increase profits, which can be passed onto the cartels. While I have no direct knowledge and am 100% speculating here, there may be some guns or drugs stored in the avocado warehouses.
Naturally, with any large-scale operation involving the U.S. Government, we send USDA food inspectors to these avocado fields and processing facilities to perform routine health and sanitation inspections. The cartels aren’t too happy when the gringos in white lab coats start sniffing around the warehouses. As a result, harassment of the inspectors and even kidnapping them have occurred. It happened this year, and it’s happened before. In 2022, the U.S. halted imports after the cartels threatened USDA workers from completing their jobs. This year, the L.A. times reported:
The decision to stop inspections occurred after two United States Department of Agriculture employees were “recently attacked and detained while carrying out their work in the state of Michoacán inspecting avocados,” U.S. Ambassador Ken Salazar said in a statement.
Hannah Fry, Kate Linthicum, Patrick J. McDonnell. “Avocados toast? Price and availability could suffer after USDA halts some Mexican inspections” – Los Angeles Times, 18 June 2024
So, if you didn’t already have a reason to dislike the cartels, now you do. Their violation of the nonaggression principle is fucking with the price of my amazing homemade guacamole.