ENVIRONMENT: U.S. Avocado and Tomato Farmers Fight Mexican Free Trade

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

SAN FRANCISCO, Jul 16 1996 (IPS) - Anyone in the United States who expected cheap guacamole to be one of the benefits of free trade with Mexico will be disappointed — if U.S. farmers have their way.

Guacamole, the tasty Mexican appetiser made from avocado and tomatoes, has increased in popularity in recent years in border states from California to Florida. But the message from U.S. farmers is clear: the buttery green and red dish should be made from crops grown in the United States and not from cheap imports.

Farmers in California are opposing the lifting of an 81-year- old ban on imports of Mexican avocados. And Florida farmers are against the recent surge in Mexican tomato imports which have caused wholesale prices to plummet.

Truckers from Mexico going to the busy border towns of Laredo, Texas and Nogales, Arizona have quickly discovered that avocados and tomatoes from the south are not welcome there.

Mexico is the biggest producer of avocados in the world, growing some 800,000 tons of the fruit a year in the southern state of Michoacan. This is approximately 45 percent of global output and some five times the production of California.

But Mexican avocados have been banned for 80 years in the United States for environmental and health reasons, not least because a variety of fruit flies and weevils have been discovered on the raw produce. Only processed avocado pulp can be imported into the United States from Mexico.

This ban is scheduled to be lifted in November, an action that has so alarmed growers in this country, that they have asked the U.S. Congress to authorise the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service of the Department of Agriculture to study the threat of pest invasions from Mexico. The House of Representatives has already passed the bill.

“The methodology of all the studies so far has been flawed, so we are very uneasy,” said Tom Bellamore, senior vice-president of the California Avocado Commission in Santa Ana near Los Angeles. “We have asked that a fundamental first step be taken and proper studies be conducted. Any scientist will tell you that is essential.”

The Florida tomato industry is demanding a lot more. Unlike the avocado industry, tomatoes are not bound by environmental and health bans although there are rules limiting the total volume of imports into the country.

The 600-million-dollar winter tomato industry in Florida is seeing red because their market has been devastated by cheap Mexican imports in the last two years.

The surge in imports is a direct result of the 1994 passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), aimed at opening the borders between Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Wholesale prices for a 11.33 kilogramme box of tomatoes fell at one time from 14 dollars to less than some three dollars a box. California does export tomatoes to Mexico, because while Mexico grows its tomatoes in the winter, California produces its crop in the summer.

A recent Tampa Tribune editorial summed up the situation: “Florida’s vegetable farmers are being peeled and sliced by their Mexican competitors.”

The U.S. Department of Commerce has decided to examine dumping charges on Sep. 9.

Mexican officials have cried foul. They have turned to the Geneva-based World Trade Organisation (WTO) to review the allegations in the dumping case, charging that the Department of Commerce artificially chose a period of investigation to support the U.S. growers case.

Florida Tomato Exchange members are also playing the health and safety card by charging that growers in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, where much of the Mexican tomato industry is based, use excessive quantities of toxic pesticides.

Studies by Mexican human rights organisations back up these claims. A Sep. 1993 analysis by a local human rights group of 100 water samples in Villa Juarez, Sinaloa, showed that 95 percent tested positive for 10 organophosphate compounds and three organochlorines. Only four of those 13 compounds are permitted for use in Mexico.

Despite the fact that the numbers of Florida tomato farmers are dwindling (there are only 88 farms left in the state, down from 200 two years ago), several wealthy families who control the biggest farms — including the DiMare, Gargiulo, Heller, and Esformes families — have vowed to continue the battle.

The tomato industries in the two countries have something in common: they depend heavily on poor Mexican and Central American labour, an increasing number of whom are indigenous peoples who do not speak Spanish, let alone English.

In Sinaloa, the workers are Mixtec Indians from Oaxaca, while in Mexico’s Nayarit state, the workers are Huichole Indians. In California’s San Joaquin Valley, the centre of much of the agriculture, as many as a tenth of the workers may be Mixtec, according to estimates by Fred Kissman of the University of California at San Diego.

The feud over farm trade is bound to continue. During the first 10 months of 1995, Mexican agricultural exports to the United States, excluding grains, rose by 42 percent to 2.9 billion dollars, while U.S. agricultural exports to Mexico fell 44 percent to 724 million dollars.

Not that this new orientatation towards increased trade has helped nutrition in Mexico. Per capita consumption of corn, wheat, fruits and vegetables has dropped by 29 percent over the past six years, according to the National Nutrition Commission.