Eleventh International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

The road a Mexican avocado travels from farm to guacamole has increasingly become punctuated with violence. The average American eats over eight pounds of avocados a year. In an effort to satiate the fast-growing appetite Americans have for them, Mexico exports 2.1 billion pounds of the fruit each year. When NAFTA opened the border to avocados from Mexico, the Mexican state of Michoacán was the only area that met required sanitary conditions. The booming avocado business increased the Michoacán farmer’s profit from two and a half pesos per pound to 80 pesos per pound. Avocados have also attracted the unwanted attention of drug cartels that have brought violence to their farmers and industry workers. Drug cartels have capitalized on the $3 billion a year trade of avocados between Mexico and the United States. But with a multi-billion drug market in the United States alone, what leads cartels to encroach into other markets? In short, US anti-drug policies with unintended secondary and tertiary effects that can be credited with the creation and growth of drug trafficking organizations in Mexico. Despite the blockades and prohibitions, American demand to consume marijuana, cocaine, opium, and methamphetamines only grew. In spite of bilateral attempts to bring these organizations down, the cartels have flourished. A byproduct of US prohibition laws, Mexican cartels have steadily expanded over the decades because of American drug use and fruitless legislation. When the strategy moved to combating cartels economically, the cartels simply diversified their portfolios and began extorting the avocado industry.