Growing Hopes, Dry Negotiations: Mexican and U.S. Avocado Industries at the Age of Free Trade Agreements and Climate Change

Abstract

This article explores how Michoacán and California’s avocado growers navigated the North American Free Trade Agreement’s (NAFTA) negotiations and how they responded to its ratification after 1994. Although NAFTA is the reference in time for this narrative, the article focuses on the environmental changes in Michoacán and California instead of the trade negotiations to accentuate international agreements’ impacts on concrete ecologies and vice versa. NAFTA presupposed the termination of trade barriers between Mexican and U.S. markets. Nonetheless, it was not enough for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to lift a quarantine on Mexican avocados imposed in 1914 due to an alleged plague affecting the fruit. However, when California faced severe climatic difficulties to increase or even maintain its avocado yields while Michoacán proved to have a propitious pest-free ecological context for the avocado tree to thrive, the USDA concluded a period of over 80 years of domestic protectionism of the avocado market. To grasp how the avocado industries in Michoacán and California responded to volatile times both in transnational trade and environmental change in the late twentieth century, this article mostly recourses to oral and written records of growers on both sides of the border. Interviews with growers and people connected to the avocado industry in Michoacán, as well as growers’ annual meeting minutes in California, aided in uncovering the anxieties of adjusting to the integration of markets in times of neoliberal globalization and climate change.