Avocados Without Borders? Ecology and Inequality in the NAFTA Era

This presentation examines the ecological and economic dynamics underpinning the dramatic rise of avocado consumption in the United States in the early twenty-first century. While California is commonly assumed to be the nation’s primary supplier, approximately 90 percent of avocados consumed in the United States since the early 2000s have come from Mexico, the world’s largest producer. Focusing on two key producing regions, the Mexican state of Michoacán and Southern California, this presentation explores how growers navigated the negotiations of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and responded to its ratification in 1994.

Drawing on minutes from meetings of California avocado growers, I highlight how ecological conditions shaped trade politics on both sides of the border. Differences in climate, pest prevalence, water availability, and phytosanitary regulations informed growers’ strategies, alliances, and perceptions of risk and opportunity. In Southern California, producers confronted environmental constraints and rising production costs, while growers in Michoacán leveraged favorable agroecological conditions to expand export capacity. These ecological asymmetries became central to negotiations over market access and sanitary standards right after the NAFTA ratification.

The paper argues that although small-scale producers were not uniformly crushed by liberalization and, in some cases, adapted creatively to shifting market structures, the primary beneficiaries of trade integration remained transnational corporations embedded in the industrial food complex. By situating NAFTA within environmental history and political economy, this research reframes the “avocado boom” as a transnational story shaped as much by ecological realities as by trade policy, revealing the uneven distribution of gains in North America’s integrated agricultural markets.