It might be hard to think that any fruit would be banned in the United States, but avocado is one such fruit.

Avocados are one of the leading fruit in America, with 2.6 billion pounds of avocados consumed every year. Still, despite that, the United States thought it was time to cut ties with avocados. The main reason avocados were almost banned was that the main supply of avocados comes from the Mexican state of Michoacan, where drug cartels in that area extort avocado farmers regularly. Because 92% of U.S. imports of avocados come from Michoacan, drug cartels make some of their money from squeezing poor avocado farmers.

Because some of their profits come from extorting avocado farmers, drug cartels sometimes go through violent ways to keep the exports into the U.S. rolling in. One of those ways was to threaten a U.S. inspector who wouldn’t let the batch of avocados go through. The threat led the U.S. Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (USDA-APHIS) to suspend Michoacán’s export license for avocados temporarily, Mexico’s Agriculture Ministry said Saturday in a statement. Since the U.S. takes death threats against their employees seriously, the U.S. Department of Agriculture decided to ban the importation of avocados into the U.S. until the drug cartels would get out of the avocado market.

Fortunately for the Michoacan farmers and U.S. consumers, the avocado ban has been lifted. So now you can keep paying that $2.50 for the guacamole at Chipotle instead of what would’ve been $10.

Source contributing to this story:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/food/2022/02/17/avocado-ban-mexico-shortage-price-increase/6783716001/