Avocado as guacamole is a must for tacos or chips on game day or every day. It is the all-time fav brekkie as avocado toasts or Avocado Benedicts around the world. It is the crown jewel of poke bowls or Cobb Salads and a mandatory ingredient in all green liquids. Americans eat 4 kilos of it on average per year, that comes up to 3 billion avocados, gracias to Mexico which exports 80 percent of all of this green goodness to the great US of A. The word Avocado derives from the Aztec (Nahuatl to be precise) word ahuacatl, which means testicles. The world just can’t get enough of those green balls.
Well, avocado is life and death too. Not for you of course, you could live happily if your guac cravings are not fulfilled every day or you couldn’t drink your neon smoothie with the 178 nutrients in the morning. I mean for the farmers, the producers, the countries that live off avocados and for all humans on the planet in the long run. As the demand is rising producers are facing new challenges created by climate change: soil erosion, water scarcity, new diseases, heat stress just to name a few. On top of that supply chains are disrupted by war, so a lot of cargo ships have to take detours, which add to the carbon footprint of your precious superfood. For example it used to take 20-25 days for avocados to reach Europe from Tanzania or Kenya, now it takes 45-50 days, because of the so-called Red Sea Crisis (yes, the Houthis). When it comes to thirst, avocados are beasts: it takes an average of 70 liters of water to grow one (!) piece of avocado. Please do start to multiply that in your head with the yearly avo-consumption of the United States. I help you: it comes up to 2.1 billion hectoliters, which equals the volume of water in 84,000 Olympic-size pools. As the weather is getting warmer and warmer these plants need more water to grow healthy fruits and more land to meet demand.
Avocado is life and death in Mexico. Death for forests, because 80 percent of the new avocado orchards were established illegally through corruption of public officials, which led to significant deforestation in the Michoacán region. As much as 10 football fields of forests are cleared every day to grow these fruits.
The green gold is death for farmers too as Mexican cartels stepped into the guacamole game. They are extorting farmers for “protection” and they put an “extra tax” on each box of fruit for them. What’s even worse, they reroute rivers for the megafarms, so small farmers have no means to irrigate their orchards and go bankrupt. Over 20 cartels with around 200K armed goons are contesting the territory. They are believed to control close to 40 percent of this multi-billion-dollar business already. And whoever fights back faces punishment: kidnapping, torture, and execution. The farmers don’t give up; they form militias named autodefensa groups to patrol and defend their farms. That is war, the Avocado War with hundreds of victims every year.
Avocado is a clear example of overconsumption: demand is growing, we want more, we buy more (even if part of it goes rotten in the fridge), which triggers deforestation. The new orchards need more water, which leads to water scarcity. More avocados mean more shipping. All that is making the carbon footprint of this superfood growing exponentially, which fuels climate change, which brings hotter weather, new diseases for the plants and drought. So the snake is biting its tail and not just on the tattoo on the neck of the cartel member blowing up the riverbank to reroute the source of water for irrigation.
It’s a vicious circle and unfortunately not the only one. Coffee, cocoa, and your favourite matcha tea are on the same list. I don’t say that you should feel guilty every time you reach for that tortilla chip and dunk it in the guac, but I’m damn sure that you should cut back on your annual dose. Not for my sake, but for the sake of life on Earth.
