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The Great Avocado Freak-Out of 2016?

Two months have gone by since I last posted. Those two months off from blogging gave me time to read more widely, think more deeply, and travel further than the busyness of the academic year allows. Those two months also gave me a chance to enjoy the Minnesota summer without spending my Sunday mornings writing indoors, choosing instead to spend those mornings on long runs.

To mark this return to blogging, I thought it would be fitting to talk about avocados, since two journalists who emailed me last week mentioned an article by Joanna Blythman titled “Can Hipsters Stomach the Unpalatable Truth about Avocado Toast?” in–where else?–the Guardian.

Avocados are apparently huge YUGE these days, which is strange because I remember avocados being pretty popular back in the 1980s, when fat became the enemy and a “Californian” diet became fashionable. Lest there be a doubt in anyone’s mind, Blythman’s article essentially tells readers that they need to stop eating avocados right now because doing so has dire consequeneces. (By the way, the author of the article is the same Joanna Blythman who was responsible for The Great Quinoa Guilt Trip of 2013.)

Here is part of Blythman’s argument, along with a rejoinder. I am not responding to the whole thing (there is just too much to discuss, some of which I am not qualified to discuss, and I’d really like to keep this post under 700 words); the following is what jumped at me when I read her article.

[I]n Mexico, the unprecedented international appetite for [avocados] is indirectly fueling illegal deforestation and environmental degradation. … The problem is created by the fact that it’s now theoretically more profitable for Mexican farmers to grow avocados than most other crops. So much so that in Michoacán, the state that produces most of the country’s avocados and arguably the world’s avocado capital, growers are ignoring the law and thinning out mature pine forest to plant young avocado trees instead.

There are two possibilities here. Either those farmers own the land on which they thin out pine forest to plant avocado trees, or they do not own that land and are squatting it.

One the one hand, if farmers own the land, the fact that they own it gives them every incentive to maintain and improve the quality of that land, and as they are almost surely keeping in mind the future worth of their land when they substitute avocado trees for pines, I can hardly see what the issue is.

If it is a public goods problem that they are substituting avocado trees for pine forest, the solution to that problem is a payments for ecosystem services (PES). The provision of such payments in cases where they are warranted is the responsibility of the state.

More importantly, if farmers own those lands, they can pretty much do whatever they want with it, and trying to dictate what those farmers can and cannot do with land that they own is just colonialism’s flavor du jour: “Please, señor Mexican farmer, don’t cut those trees, because we in Blighty think it’s not cool…”

(To a lesser extent, the provision of PES can also be the responsibility of NGOs, which suggest that wealthy foreigners who derive welfare from mature pine forest in Mexico could put their money where their mouths are and start paying Mexican farmers not to thin out mature pine forests to plant young avocado.)

On the other hand, if farmers do not own the lands they deforest and squat new lands in order to plant young avocado trees, the problem is one of enforcement and weak institutions. That is, if Mexican farmers extensify by deforesting lands that they do not own, they are presumably moving onto lands that belong to the state, in which case it is the state’s job to make sure that farmers do not encroach on its lands. In this case, the problem lies in the state not being able to properly enforce its own property right.

Either way, the problem begins and ends with state capacity. This is especially so if, as Blythman speculates, the international trade of avocados serves to line the pockets of the Mexican drug cartels. Instead of blaming farmers who are only trying to do what’s best for themselves and their families, it would perhaps be wiser to lay the blame for deforestation at the Mexican government’s door.