Holy Guacamole: Avocado Import Ban Is The Pits For Dip Lovers

ACROSS AMERICA — This could dip into your snacking fun. At least Super Bowl LVI is over, and you don’t have a houseful of guests chipping away at you because there’s no guacamole.

But still, the weekend is coming, and so is National Margarita Day — the made-up but perfectly wonderful holiday is Tuesday, Feb. 22. It’s no time to be without avocados.

But we may well soon be avocado-less. Here's why:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture indefinitely suspended imports of avocados from Mexico after a member of its Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service received a threatening phone call, apparently by a member of a Mexican drug cartel putting the muscle on avocado growers in the state of Michoacán.

Raul Lopez, Mexico manager of the agricultural commodities market research company Agtools, told The Washington Post that the inspector who was threatened found a shipment of avocados from Puebla State, which is not authorized to export them. Michoacán is the only state in Mexico fully authorized to export avocados to the United States.

“The people from the facility tried to intimidate and then [threaten] the inspector, so he reported it to the USDA, then they decided to pull out all the inspectors and close the border indefinitely,” Lopez told the newspaper.

The U.S. inspectors have been on the ground in Michoacán State for at least 25 years to ensure that Mexico-grown Hass avocados don’t bring diseases and pathogens that would hurt U.S. crops.

The import ban was announced Sunday, the same day Mexican avocado growers and packers aired the latest in nearly a decade of Super Bowl commercials that aim to seal guacamole as a tradition on NFL’s biggest day.

You may already have sliced avocados from your shopping list, though.

Avocados have doubled in price in the past year, David Magaña, a senior analyst for RaboResearch Food & Agribusiness, told The Post.

Consumers are gobbling up what’s left in grocery stores and markets. At the current buying pace, the inventory of avocados will be depleted in a matter of days, and that will likely drive prices higher, Lopez told The Post.

A few more avocados from Mexico could still trickle into the United States if they were inspected and certified for export on or before Feb. 11, The Post reported.

The exports were suspended indefinitely. It’s unclear if the ban will be lifted before the next big avocado holiday, Cinco de Mayo on May 5.

“Cinco de Mayo is going to be impacted heavily,” Martha Montoya, chief executive of Agtools, told The Post. “We have six weeks to be shipping product for the celebration.”

The Mexican state of Jalisco received authorization in December to begin exporting avocados to the United States, but they will be available in limited quantities and won’t begin arriving until late spring or early summer, Montoya said.