Avocado Growers See Mexican Threat

California avocado growers are as hot as habaneros over Bush administration plans to lift a 90-year-old ban on the import of Hass avocados from Mexico into the state.

The growers fear the Mexican fruit could introduce harmful insects to groves from San Diego to San Luis Obispo.

At the request of Mexican trade officials, the U.S. Department of Agriculture plans to open up all 50 states to avocados from south of the border. Currently, they are allowed only in 31 Northern and Midwestern states far from the nation’s avocado-growing regions. The USDA also would permit Mexican avocados to enter the U.S. year-round instead of restricting their importation, as is now the case, to Oct. 15 to April 15, when insects are less common.

“There are pests in Mexico that we still don’t have in our groves, and we don’t want them here,” said Jerome Stehly, chairman of the California Avocado Commission in Irvine.

The commission has asked the USDA for a two-year exclusion on imports to avocado-growing states, which include Florida and Hawaii, and their immediate neighbors. The agency said it was considering waiting one year before lifting the import ban.

“If they make a mistake with avocados being shipped to Illinois, it is one thing,” said Stehly, who manages 1,500 acres of trees in San Diego County. “If they make a mistake in California, we have huge problems.”

Growers are particularly concerned about three types of weevils and one moth species that are common in Mexico but unknown in California orchards, said Phil Phillips, an entomologist at the University of California Cooperative Extension office in Ventura. “These are devastating pests that could put the industry out of business,” he said.

The migration of agricultural pests from Mexico through other crops already has changed the way avocados are farmed here.

“Avocados used almost no pesticide a decade ago,” Phillips said. Now growers are spending $60 to $100 an acre to control pests that have migrated north.

California is by far the largest producer of avocados in the U.S., supplying 86% of the nation’s crop. The state is home to 6,500 growers, who produced 335 million pounds last year with a value of $363 million. Each year, on average, Americans each eat about 2.5 pounds of avocado -- also known as alligator pear -- the basic ingredient in guacamole.

The premium Hass variety is a California native, tracing its roots to a single tree growing in the 1920s La Habra backyard of Rudolph Hass. That mother tree is the genetic origin of every Hass avocado worldwide.

Mexico has historically pushed for increased access to the U.S. market, noting that under the North American Free Trade Agreement and World Trade Organization rules, there is no reason to bar the fruit.

“We believe that this is only an economic issue,” said Froylan Gracia, agricultural counselor at the Mexican Embassy in Washington.

Gracia said the USDA’s precautions -- which include inspecting Mexican orchards that export the fruit, requiring the avocados to be transported in sealed containers and inspecting them again once they cross the border -- reduce the chances of an infestation to “near zero percent.”

USDA officials agree. “We did a risk assessment,” said Larry Hawkins, a USDA spokesman in Sacramento, “and it appeared to be a reasonable request.”

According to the USDA assessment, fewer than 400 infested avocados would cross into the U.S. each year, and fewer than a dozen would be discarded in an avocado-producing region.

The USDA said an unlikely set of circumstances would have to occur for an infestation to take place. The pest would have to survive the trip. The infested avocado would have to be tossed near plants that could sustain the insect. The pest would have to avoid being killed by another animal, unfriendly weather and other threats. And finally, it would have to find a mate.

About the only way growers can prevent the new rules from going into effect is to convince the agency that “the information the USDA is relying on is faulty,” Hawkins said. “They would have to demonstrate that there is a real risk.”

Growers have until Friday to submit comments to the USDA. The agency said there was no timetable for reviewing the comments and issuing final rules.

An economic analysis by the USDA noted that domestic growers could take a financial hit if the rules are changed.

Exports of fresh Mexican avocados would nearly triple to 141 million pounds, the agency estimated. Sales of domestic fruit would fall by about 10% to a projected 341 million pounds. Exports from Chile, the leading foreign supplier, also would decline. Consumers could see a small price break. The USDA said the wholesale price of a California avocado would be likely to drop about 15% to $1.26.

This battle, however, is not about competition, the avocado commission’s Stehly said. “This is a pest issue.”

He noted that California growers had helped develop the Chilean crop and hadn’t fought imports from New Zealand and the Dominican Republic. And they aren’t vigorously objecting to the portions of the proposal that would open up most of the nation to year-round imports of Mexican fruit.

Some in the business could benefit if the ban were lifted.

Santa Ana-based Calavo Growers Inc., for instance, opened an avocado packinghouse in Uruapan, Michoacan, seven years ago. It packs and distributes about 30% of all the Mexican avocados for export during the six-month period that sales are now allowed in the U.S.

But for now, the company is attempting to stay out of the controversy.

“It is premature to speculate the precise impact, if any, the proposed rule change regarding importation of Mexican-grown avocados would have on the industry or Calavo specifically,” Lee Cole, its chief executive, said in a statement.

Others in the industry aren’t so diplomatic. Bob Lucy, co-owner of Del Rey Avocado Co. in Fallbrook, Calif., observed bitterly that the Mexican government was pushing to expand its growers’ markets while the U.S. government, in his view, was doing nothing to protect its own.

“The Mexicans take better care of their farmers than we do,” he said.