California Avocado Commission Board Letter
Letter to CAC board
Date: August 7, 2025
To: Jason Cole, Chair, and members of the California Avocado Commission Board
Re: USDA inspections of the Mexican avocado export pipeline into the US market
Jason and CAC Board Members:
The published board positions and public comments that the CAC has promulgated to the media, including Ken’s recent interview, have been wonderfully clear concerning the needs for USDA personnel to inspect every component of the production, packing, shipping and delivery pipeline of avocados into the U.S. from Mexico.
A very important step in your actions was the publication of The Growing Threat to California Avocados, California Avocado Commission, May 2025. In it, and reiterated in other released materials, we’ve made an argument for returning oversight to the USDA emphasizing the potential of the introduction of dangerous pests targeting avocado orchards in California.
The CAC is demanding three immediate actions by the USDA:
1. Reinstatement of the original USDA inspection protocols as established in 1997, when our two countries agreed on an Operational Work Plan for the introduction of Mexican avocados into the U.S market.
2. The provision of diplomatic and physical security support to reestablish U.S inspector presence at all points along the Mexican industry export pipeline.
3. Holding Mexico accountable for maintenance of U.S. phytosanitary standards.
However, the Board has also alluded to underlying issues at the heart of the loss of our longstanding ability to document the provenance of imported fruit. As you note, the ostensible justification given for the USDA’s withdrawal of their APHIS program staff from direct onsite inspection of orchards and packing houses was the rising threat of cartel violence in the Mexican avocado growing regions. You wrote: “Mexican inspections alone cannot be trusted to meet the phytosanitary standards the U.S. has long required” (pg 4). But as well, in your March 2025 letter to USDA Secretary Rollins, you state that as a result of the withdrawal of “boots on the ground inspection”, California growers are being allowed “to be victimized by Mexican cartels rather than directing Mexico to correct the security problems or forego importing avocados in the United States” (pg 4).
Needed expansion of the basis for requiring USDA direct onsite inspections
U.S. packers have been unable to act in opposition to Mexico’s illegal avocado-driven deforestation and the violence that comes with it. Likely as a direct result of this inaction, the USDA, the HAB , and, the CAC have condoned and turned a blind eye to these following well-documented ongoing conditions:
Continued sourcing from orchards on land that was cleared in violation of Mexican law. Climate Rights International and Guardian Forestal identified 60 shipments from three prominent American avocado importers of fruit grown on recently deforested regions in Michoacán and Jalisco.
Purchasing from groves developed on land where forests were destroyed by intentionally set fires, a tactic often orchestrated or protected by cartels, to seize territory and intimidate communities. By purchasing these avocados, the importer community has effectively rewarded and incentivized further criminal land grabs and violence against forest guardians.
Ignoring formal warnings and transparency requests. The US State Department forbade the movement of American government employees off the principal highways in Michoacán and Jalisco in August 2023, due to excessive risk of physical harm. This has yet to be lifted, in spite of the USDA ‘s appeals to do so.
Despite being made aware of deforestation, ecological devastation, and public disclosure by multiple investigators of the corruption and cartel control of resources within their supply chains, and the latters’ investigated association with fentanyl and heroin smuggling, American wholesalers and their commercial marketing partners received no clear messaging from the CAC to not accept fruit from illicit orchards.
This lack of clear messaging of the contamination of the American consumer’s avocado supply, committed in spite of the ongoing public sustainability pledges guaranteed by the importers, made these signed and legally binding agreements little more than window dressing. These oversights might have been recognized by the distributors, but in each and every case, these perpetrated untruths were condoned by the import industry and forgiven. The CAC’s silence concerning this has been deafening.
This resulted in the industry supplying virtually every major U.S. supermarket chain with CONFLICT FRUIT, thereby embedding tainted avocados deep into American grocery aisles and consumer consciousness.
Attached here is an appendix that cites published work describing the dire conditions governing the Mexican avocado industry. Through this “greenwashing” of their brands, and the failure to cut off suppliers who are breaching Mexico environmental laws and conditions of our trade agreements, our importers, packers and shippers have allowed the following well-documented violations of trade agreements:
1. failure to uphold standards and certification of sustainable and ethical sourcing;
2. undermining of genuine anti-deforestation efforts;
3. betrayal of local communities fighting to protect their forests and water supplies;
4. appropriation by cartel and organized crime syndicates with control over picking, packing and shipping maintained through extortion, intimidation, violence, bribery, and uninvestigated subsidies.
Americans can only do so much to directly contribute to the correction of these conditions. But, most importantly for the continued representation by the CAC of its grower members, we should agree on correcting the circumstances which jeopardize the future of avocado farming in California:
Not that many years ago, the California avocado farmland consisted of 85,000 producing acres that supplied 100% of the US market for healthy avocados. Now the producing acreage in California Avocado Industry is less than 45,000 acres, and only supplies 10% of the US market, (now >2 billion #/yr, 55% of the global consumption!) Conversely, US avocado exports to foreign producers are 0%.
California growers are seeing a continued set of stresses on our harvests as well as our profitability. This is a conflation of many factors: erratic, unpredictable weather conditions and their effects on tree health and fruit production; escalating costs for water, electricity, and supplies; regulatory requirements to fulfill safe use of pesticides, fertilizers, soil amendments; and the safety, availability and pay for skilled labor. But all of that could be coped with, save for the most critically unmanaged aspect of our ability to sell our fruit and realize income to meet our expenses: the continuing competition from Mexico and other foreign sources who are able to produce and sell avocados at a small fraction of the expenses we incur to farming, and who can allow the prices to drop well under any chance of profitability for us.
The CAC Mission Statement reads: “To maximize grower returns by enhancing premium brand positioning for California avocados and improving grower sustainability.” While the CAC board is supposed to execute policies to the benefit their member farmers, it has moved instead to suppress actions which would have benefited growers, while advocating for and operationalizing proposals to increase the volume of avocado sales regardless of country of origin. By the board’s own reporting, the tens of millions of dollars of grower tithed funds spent on marketing and outreach, supposedly to further the aims of the organization, have failed to do so.
Actions that the Board should consider
The CAC Board must expand the scope of the justifications for complete ascertainment of compliance with U.S. standards of agricultural best practices by the import pipeline. This should incorporate the recognition of the wrongs being committed by the Mexican avocado industry as conditions that they must correct, and at the least equate the gravity and import of these violations with the phytosanitary issues you have already made a case for.
The obvious first step will be to re-invoke the conditions placed on the importation of Mexican avocados that governed their initial approval for sale in the U.S. – a restriction on sales until certain criteria for those desired standards are met to the satisfaction of the American government organizations tasked with oversight of international trade.
Certainly we are all looking forward to a successful future for the California avocado industry, producers and handlers alike. Let’s work together to make this our common goal.
Yours truly,
Norm Kachuck