Yes, yes — you’ve heard it before. Avocados are thirsty, dirty, cartel-ridden. But this story isn’t about avocados. It’s about us.
For me, it was always a brunch cliché — a green smear on toast, avocado mania, the punchline to millennial jokes. But then I followed its journey, and the story got darker, and closer to home, than I expected.
It begins in Michoacán, Mexico’s avocado belt. Tens of thousands of hectares of pine and oak forest have disappeared in the past decade, often through arson. Wells and irrigation ponds draw heavily on local water tables. Farmers are forced to pay “taxes” to cartels, sometimes at gunpoint, just to harvest their own fruit. Cartels skim millions annually through ‘taxes’ on orchards, harvests, and transport — estimates run into the hundreds of millions over recent years.
But the real revelation wasn’t in Mexico. It was in Rotterdam.
Rotterdam: Europe’s Avocado Gatekeeper
The Netherlands doesn’t grow a single avocado. And yet 63% of Europe’s imports land here. In Westland, warehouses ripen them with scientific precision before sending four out of every five onwards. 84% of Germany’s avocados pass through Dutch hands first. We don’t just eat them. We curate them.
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At first, I wondered if that made us responsible. After all, aren’t we just a trading nation? The Dutch role has always been to move goods, not to police their origins. Neutral, efficient, profitable.
But in my search for answers, I found that neutrality isn’t so simple. In Rotterdam, inspectors check for pesticides and pests — for our safety. What they don’t check is whether the orchard was planted on a burned hillside, or whether a farmer paid protection money. That’s not neutrality. That’s selective blindness. Yet the real driver sits further upstream: our appetite. Rotterdam doesn’t decide what fills its warehouses; our diets do.
When Fentanyl Ate the Drug Market
Avocado demand soared on the back of millennial culture. The Dutch now eat double the EU average. In the U.S., Super Bowl weekend guacamole alone drives 120,000 tons of demand. Cartels noticed. As drug markets shifted with the rise of fentanyl, cartels diversified. They are run as businesses, after all. Avocados — steady, profitable, and hard to trace — became ‘green gold.’ Orchards seized, farmers taxed per hectare, trucks hijacked. This was a twist I didn’t expect: cartels don’t just follow cocaine routes anymore. They follow brunch culture. In Uruapan, nineteen bodies were strung from bridges in 2019. The city is the avocado capital, and while the killings reflected wider cartel turf wars, the fruit’s value made it part of the fight. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has also suspended avocado inspections on several occasions after cartel threats to inspectors.
Here, I stopped and asked myself: if I were a farmer in Michoacán, what choice would I make? Probably the same one. Apparently, picking avocados pays ~$60/day — much better than Mexico’s ~$5 minimum wage — but is increasingly dangerous.
Survival and Sentence
For people in Michoacán, avocados are both survival and sentence. They provide 78,000 jobs and bring in $3 billion in exports, but those benefits come tangled with violence, deforestation, and disappearing water. It’s a familiar story across the tropics — soy in Brazil, palm oil in Indonesia, cobalt in Congo — where communities depend on industries that slowly undermine their own future. It’s logical that these regions want to make the most of their resources to create development. The tragedy is that while farmers and workers carry the risks, the profits rarely flow back to them.
Fragmented Cartels, Growing Extortion
Cartels found it was easier to exploit local economies than run transnational drug routes. However, government strategy (killing/capturing cartel leaders) fragmented big cartels into smaller, predatory groups. Locals say life became harder after large cartels fractured: more groups, more extortion, less predictability.
Yet, not everyone accepted the trade-off. In 2011, the Indigenous town of Cherán expelled cartels and loggers, banned avocado farming, and replanted pine forests.
The Tollbooth of Globalization
But avocados aren’t really the point. They’re the prism. They show us how globalization works: producers trapped, hubs profiting, consumers outsourcing guilt. It’s the blood diamond story, just painted green.
And that’s when it hit me: our ties with Latin America also live in these hidden highways of trade, where Latin America bears the costs and the Netherlands collects the tolls. At the end of the avocado highway, the story isn’t about fruit. It’s about power, profit, and the stories we tell ourselves.
We call it trade. We call it efficiency. We call it neutrality. But neutrality isn’t neutral. It’s a choice.
Every avocado on the shelf carries a choice. Not just Rotterdam’s, not just the Netherlands’ — ours. And whether we use that power or not is a question worth asking.
