Last updated on August 28, 2016
Last week, in a post titled “The Great Avocado Freak-Out of 2016?,” I commented on a Guardian article whose apparent aim was to make Western/Northern/developed-country consumers cut back on their consumption of avocados because it led to deforestation and allegedly financed organized crime in Mexico.
Since I published that post, I discovered that Nathan J. Robinson had commented on the Guardian article before I did for the magazine Current Affairs in an article titled “It Is Perfectly Acceptable to Unashamedly Enjoy Avocados“:
But the flip-side of increased avocado consumption is, of course, a booming avocado industry. In fact, the Guardian’s reporting on the environmental problem points out that Mexican avocado farmers are now earning sums of up to $500,000 per year on the yield provided by a single plot of land …
Blythman is aware that Mexican farmers may be very pleased with the current demand for their product. But she says that: “It’s a moot point whether the Mexicans who actually grow these on-trend fruits eventually harvest their fair share of the economic benefits.” But surely it’s the most important point. An argument that our love of avocados is actually hurting the Mexican people should deal centrally with the question of whether our love of avocados is actually hurting the Mexican people …
[T]the real problem with arguments like Blythman’s [is that] they treat systemic problems as if they are the product of narrow individual consumption choices, and can therefore be fixed through changes in those choices. Blythman warns that cartels in Mexico take a portion of avocado profits. But the cartels aren’t going to go away, or be affected much at all, if Brits go back to using jam on their toast.
Elsewhere around the Internet, the Pacific Standard’s Kate Wheeling summarized a conversation she and I had a few weeks ago as follows, in an article for containing a nice overview of some of the research I have been doing these past few years:
[W]hen Marc Bellemare, an associate professor in the Department of Applied Economics and director of the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy at the University of Minnesota, looked at the data — a decade of national surveys of roughly 227,000 households across Peru — he and his colleagues found that the bump in quinoa’s popularity was actually a boon to both the grain’s producers and consumers in South America …
At a certain point, however, rising food prices can have detrimental effects on communities in developing countries. Bellemare’s research has linked massive price escalations –like the 51 percent jump in food prices between 2007 and 2008, and the 40 percent increase between 2010 and 2011 –to food riots and social unrest around the globe. So when do price hikes benefit a community, and when do they incite riots? It depends on how much a community relies on a commodity.
To understand avocados, you must first consider the case of quinoa.
Even in Peru, quinoa is a niche market, according to Bellemare; on average the grain accounts for only a negligible percentage of Peruvians’ budgets. By comparison, the grains that Bellemare and his team examined in relation to food riots were all staples — rice, wheat, and maize, for example. These foods can account for as much as half of a household’s budget in some African countries, Bellemare explains. “When the price of a big staple like that goes up, people take a massive hit in terms of welfare, and that’s when they get mad and that’s when they riot,” he says. “But for commodities like quinoa that are really drops in the ocean of international trade, there is no surprise that it’s not causing people to riot.”
“The cautionary tale here is, let’s not freak out without having a good reason for it,” Bellemare adds. “And usually that reason comes in the form of having good data.”