MEXICO CITY — As the Philadelphia Eagles battled earlier this year to win their first Super Bowl, viewers in the U.S. did their own attacking — directed at bowls of guacamole. Americans are estimated to have consumed more than 83 million pounds of avocados on Super Bowl Sunday alone, and more than 200 million pounds during that week.
Such revelry is a particular boom 600 miles south of the U.S. border in the mountainous Mexican state of Michoacan, which is one of the only places on the planet to harvest avocados year round. As the taste for the green fruit has grown in the United States, so have the fields here.
Known locally as “green gold,” the crops can be seen in abundance across a valley called the Hot Land and on the low slopes of the southern Sierra Madre Mountains. Here the soil, temperature and rainfall provide optimum conditions for the fruit, which local farmers have raised for centuries. The word “guacamole” comes from the indigenous Nuahatl language, literally meaning avocado sauce.
Michoacan farmers once just provided for local appetites but now produce 80 percent of all avocados eaten north of the border. “We are always in season,” says grower Ramon Paz, spokesman for the Association of Producers, Packers and Exporters of Avocados of Mexico, or APEAM. “And we are closer to Texas and the east of the United States than California and much closer than the South American countries. So our products always arrive fresher.”
Avocado consumption in the U.S. this year builds on astronomical growth in avocado exports from Michoacan during the past two decades. In the 1997-98 season, when the producers here first began shipping north, 13 million pounds of avocados crossed the border. In the last full season, it hit a record of 1.8 billion pounds. This season the figure is estimated to be even higher. (Other Mexican states also produce avocados, but only those from Michoacan are certified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture).
With such epic expansion, the tasty green fruit has become emblematic of commerce between Mexico and the United States. And it has helped the overall trade across the Rio Grande continue to grow, despite President Donald J. Trump railing against too many Mexican imports. In 2017, there was a record $557 billion worth of goods and services flowing between the United States and Mexico. Mexican exports also include cars, electrical machinery, furniture and other fruits and nuts. The U.S. trade deficit with Mexico hit a record $71 billion.
These numbers would have been tough to predict back in 2016, considering President Trump’s rhetoric against trade deals on the campaign trail. He particularly targeted the deficit with Mexico, which he blamed on the North American Free Trade Agreement that paved the way for imports of avocados and hundreds of other goods. “NAFTA is the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere,” he said in the first presidential debate. He promised to rewrite or scrap the accord.
His stance appeared to have an effect even before he took the oath of office. On Jan. 3, 2017, Ford Motor announced it would cancel a $1.6 billion dollar Mexico plant and instead expand operations in Michigan, seen by many as a capitulation to pressure from the president-elect.
However, Beatriz Leycegui, a consultant and former Mexican trade undersecretary, points to several factors that helped cross-border commerce grow in the debut year of President Trump. Firstly, the U.S. economy boomed while the dollar was strong, which meant Americans could buy more foreign goods for cheaper prices. Secondly, trade teams from Mexico, Canada and the United States are still discussing a rewrite of NAFTA while tariffs remained the same throughout 2017.
“The commerce between Mexico and the United States goes on growing because they are two complementary economies,” Leycegui says. “And they are both very open economies.”
The news of a few companies canceling plan ts in Mexico garnered media attention but they appear to be outliers. With Mexico’s minimum wage less than a tenth of that of the United States, the economic logic continues to be to build south of the Rio Grande and sell north of it. In December, Ford announced it was shifting production of some electric cars from Michigan to Mexico.
While the deficit favors Mexico, however, more U.S. goods also are flowing south, from medical equipment to airplanes to refined gasoline. In 2017 alone, U.S. companies exported $1.3 billion worth of dairy products to Mexico, an annual increase of 8 percent — and it remained the biggest consumer of American milk in the world. This particularly helps the economy in Wisconsin, which swung for President Trump in the 2016 election.
Bernardo Fernandez sells cheese and milk at a small shop in the center of Mexico City, relying on imports to keep the prices low. “If we couldn’t get milk from the United States then it would be more expensive and customers would be very unhappy about that,” he says. “Although I’m sure Mexico would find somewhere else in the world to get enough milk from.”
This trend of growing U.S.-Mexico trade could be broken if President Trump actually went through with his threat to walk away from NAFTA. As negotiators participate in a seventh round of talks on rewriting the accord in Mexico City, it is unclear if they are heading toward a deal or a crash.
Perhaps Trump will be able to return to the American people with a few gains, such as raising the percentage of parts in U.S. automobiles that have to be made at home, while keeping NAFTA. Or maybe, he will scupper the whole accord despite the cries of many American companies and farmers.
“They have made advances on various chapters but there are issues that are very difficult for Mexico and Canada to accept,” says Leycegui, who helped negotiate NAFTA back in the 1990s. “We have seen how President Trump and his administration can take surprise measures from one day to the next. The threat of pulling out is still there.”
If NAFTA did end it would add billions of dollars to the cost of products on both sides of the border, in turn costing large numbers of jobs. But the avocado farmer Paz says that even if they had to pay tariffs they would be competitive exporting the “green gold” north, because American producers cannot even begin to meet the demand for the fruit.
“If there were tariffs, the American consumer would end up paying the difference,” Paz says. “But there is no country in the world that can substitute us.”
When football fans munch tons more guacamole in Super Bowl 2019, says Paz, the fruit will almost certainly still be coming from the valleys of Michoacan.
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U.S.-Mexico Trade Keeps Growing Despite Rhetoric From Donald Trump originally appeared on usnews.com
