US hands over pest inspections of Mexican avocados to Mexico, and California growers aren’t happyExBulletin

A worker packs avocados at a factory in Uruapan, Michoacan state, Mexico, on February 9, 2024. Armando Solis/AP.

switch caption Armando Solis/AP

MEXICO CITY California avocado growers are furious this week over the U.S. decision to hand over pest inspections of Mexican orchards to the Mexican government.

Inspectors from the U.S. Department of Agriculture have been monitoring imports of avocados infected with insects and diseases since 1997. In Mexico, however, they have also been threatened in recent years for refusing to certify fraudulent shipments.

Threats and violence against inspectors have led the United States to suspend inspections in the past. Producers in California wonder whether inspectors in Mexico would be better able to withstand such pressure.

“This action upends the long-standing inspection process designed to prevent known pest outbreaks in Mexico that would devastate our industry,” the California Avocado Commission wrote in an open letter to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack on Monday.

Currently, the inspectors work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, better known as APHIS. Because the United States also grows avocados, U.S. inspectors check orchards and packing plants in Mexico to ensure that exported avocados do not carry pests that could harm U.S. crops.

“It is well known that their physical presence significantly reduces the ability of others to circumvent the system,” the advocacy group wrote. “What assurances can APHIS provide that its unilateral reversal of the process will equal or exceed what has protected us?”

The letter continued: “We would like clarification as to why you concluded that replacing APHIS inspectors with Mexican government inspectors was in our best interest.”

The decision was announced last week in a brief statement from Mexico’s Ministry of Agriculture, which said that “with this agreement, the U.S. Food and Agriculture Organization recognizes the commitment of Mexican producers, who have had no health problems in their exports for more than 27 years.”

The idea that there were no problems is far from the truth.

In 2022, inspections were halted after one of the U.S. inspectors was threatened in the western state of Michoacan, where producers are regularly extorted by drug cartels. Only the states of Michoacan and Jalisco are allowed to export avocados to the United States.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported at the time that the inspector had received a threat “against him and his family.”

The inspector had “questioned the integrity of a particular shipment and refused to certify it based on concrete evidence,” the USDA statement said. Some packers in Mexico are buying avocados from other non-certified states and trying to pass them off as coming from Michoacan.

Sources said at the time that the 2022 threat involved a grower demanding that the inspector certify more avocados than his orchard could physically handle, suggesting that at least some had been smuggled in from elsewhere.

In June, two USDA workers were attacked and temporarily detained by assailants in the state of Michoacan, prompting the United States to suspend inspections in Mexico’s largest avocado-producing state.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture did not immediately respond to questions about the reasons for the decision or whether it was related to the threats.

Mexico currently supplies about 80 percent of U.S. fruit imports. U.S. producers cannot meet the country’s entire demand, nor can they provide fruit year-round.

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