The Brief

Of all the products that would be affected by President-elect Donald Trump's proposed tariffs on Mexico, avocados stand out: 90% of avocados consumed in the U.S. are imported. And almost all of those imports come from Mexico.

Trump has said he plans to impose a blanket tariff of 25% on imports from Mexico and Canada, along with an additional 10% tax on goods from China.

It's unclear whether the tariffs will be implemented or if they will serve merely as a negotiating tactic.

If enacted, they could have multiple effects on the avocado industry.

"Broad tariffs, like what's being proposed, is not something that we've seen" before, says David Ortega, a food economist and professor at Michigan State University. "We had the trade war with China back in 2018 that affected steel and aluminum, but when it comes to food, these types of policy proposals are not something that are very common or that we've seen recently."

With one of the biggest guacamole-eating events of the year — the Super Bowl — approaching in February, here's what to know about avocados, tariffs, and why so many avocados are grown in Mexico.

Prices will rise

Avocados are displayed in a grocery store in Washington, D.C., on June 14, 2022. Experts predict avocado prices will rise in the event of tariffs on Mexican imports.

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Stefani Reynolds

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First, a 25% tariff on imports from Mexico would lead to higher avocado prices at the grocery store.

But estimating just how much higher is hard to say. It's possible that producers and importers will absorb some of the costs to keep prices down and stay more competitive.

Ortega says there could be "pretty significant increases in the price of avocados. Maybe not the full 25%, but pretty close, given that there's very little substitute ability with regards to where we would source avocados."

But he cautions that because the tariffs apply only to the product's value at the border, and not to other costs like transportation and distribution within the U.S., prices may not go up by the full 25%.

Regardless of these potential price increases, however, people in the U.S. love their avocados and they're willing to pay more. Avocado consumption tripled in the U.S. between 2000 and 2021.

"Given that avocado is a staple of our consumption here, I would say that the elasticity is not very high, meaning that even with a big increase in price, consumption is not going to change that much," says Luis Ribera, a professor and extension economist in the agricultural economics department at Texas A&M University.

Why Mexico

A farmer works at an avocado plantation at the Los Cerritos avocado group ranch in Ciudad Guzman, state of Jalisco, Mexico, on Feb. 10, 2023. Most of the avocados consumed in the U.S. are grown in Mexico.

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Ulises Ruiz

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Mexico is the biggest producer of avocados in the world and exported $3.3 billion worth of avocados in 2023. A study funded by the industry estimated that avocado production supports 78,000 permanent jobs and 310,000 seasonal jobs in Mexico.

"It's a very important business in Mexico, very lucrative," Ribera says.

Mexico emerged as the largest foreign supplier of fruits and vegetables to the U.S. for a few reasons, he says. One: Its proximity to the U.S. market. With a perishable product, closer is better. Peru is the second-largest source of foreign avocados in the U.S., but its greater distance means avocados need to be shipped farther.

The other reasons for Mexico are favorable weather that allows for year-round production of avocados and access to cheap labor, according to Ribera.

Avocados are grown in the U.S. too, mostly in California and to a lesser extent Florida and Hawaii, but U.S. growers can't meet Americans' big appetite. Avocado production in the U.S. has declined, even as Americans grew fonder of the green fruit, according to the USDA.

California avocado growers have faced droughts and wildfires in recent years, making it difficult to offer the year-round availability that American consumers crave, Ortega says. In addition, land is expensive and water is limited.

If the goal of implementing tariffs is to force avocado production to move somewhere besides Mexico, that isn't easy.

It takes about eight years for avocado trees to produce fruit, according to the USDA. "This is not a product that you can just simply plant more of this season and you get more of in a few months," Ortega says.

Other countries where the U.S. sources avocados — Peru, the Dominican Republic and Chile — "just simply don't have the production capacity to replace Mexico's supply," he says.

Tariffs could impact the organic avocado market

Tariffs could also alter the market dynamic when it comes to organic vs. conventional foods.

If prices rise across the board, consumers who typically buy organic avocados might switch to conventional ones to save money. Organic produce makes up about 15% of total fruit and vegetable sales in the U.S., according to the Organic Trade Association, which represents hundreds of organic businesses and thousands of farmers.

"My hypothesis is that the price of conventional products would increase more than the premium organic product," Ortega says. He reasons that because people who are used to buying organic avocados would move to buy conventional ones, "that in turn increases the demand and would make prices rise more for that category."

Matthew Dillon, co-CEO of the Organic Trade Association, says those in the organic food industry are looking at diversifying their supply chains away from Mexico, but there's a three-year transition period required for farmers to switch from producing conventional to organic produce.

"Supply chains are not incredibly elastic in organic. It takes more time to pivot and change when there's a supply chain disruption. And tariffs are in some ways a form of supply chain disruption for a company, because it creates unpredictable pricing," he says.

Together with grocery prices that have gone up more than 26% since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump's plans for tariffs on Mexico, along with mass deportations, could create "a perfect storm of high inflationary pressure on the organic sector," Dillon says.

Furthermore, retaliatory tariffs from Mexico could have their own impacts.

Avocado producers face uncertainty as Trump's return looms

Avocados in boxes are pictured at a packing plant in the municipality of Ario de Rosales, Michoacan state, Mexico, on Sept. 21, 2023.

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Alfredo Estrella

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Aside from the threat of tariffs, the avocado industry has other challenges to deal with: climate change presents several problems, and avocados require a large amount of water to grow. Meanwhile, environmentalists say some avocado growers are cutting down forests to plant avocados.

Producers also face extortion from criminal gangs in Mexico.

And now with Trump's tariff threats, producers are left to wonder about their next steps.

"Producers, they react to market fundamentals," Ribera says. For example, people can foresee how bad weather in Mexico would affect avocado prices. Producers and retailers will adjust to higher and lower demand.

"The issue with a tariff is it's not a market fundamental — it's a policy. It's a political move," he says. "It could happen or it could not happen, or it could be increased or it could be decreased, you know. So it's hard for the whole supply chain to adjust."

When you wanna keep it simple for lunch — go with a sandwich.

Take N’ Taste — a sandwich business based in Burbank — offers a variety of options, including classics like melts and dips, and delivers to locals from a home kitchen.

What goes into running a MEHKO business?

A Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operation (MEHKO) is a type of permit available through the L.A. County Department of Public Health, which allows folks to run a food service business from their home. Although it has more limitations than a brick-and-mortar restaurant, it also provides an avenue to build small business.

According to the L.A. County Department of Public Health's website, it allows MEHKO businesses to sell up to 30 meals per day with a limit of 90 meals per week. For businesses that are approved for the county's compact mobile food operations permit, that number jumps up to 80 meals per day and 200 meals per week.

The permit doesn't allow third-party food delivery app use, meaning they deliver directly to you or you schedule a pickup with the business.

About the owners

Ashley Childs' local culinary background runs pretty deep — she's worked at places like Tony’s Darts Away, a gastropub in Burbank, as well as the vegan hole-in-the-wall restaurant Doomie's Home Cookin' on Melrose. As the chef-and-owner of Take N' Taste, she's carried those experiences into her current work, which serves as a side hustle while she pursues a master's degree in nutritional science.

It's also a side hustle of sorts for co-owner James Schroeder, who works primarily as a storyboard artist. He previously worked managing the East Hollywood Farmers Market, which helped him connect with local farmers and learn the best ways to source ingredients.

Restaurant details

• Since Childs was previously vegan, she developed vegan alternatives for many of the menu items.

Menu items we tried

Take N' Taste smoked BBQ chicken sandwich.

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• Roast Beef Dip (roast beef, Swiss cheese, grilled onions and horseradish garlic mayo on a rustic French baguette)
• Smoked BBQ Jackfruit Sandwich (organic smoked barbecue jackfruit on a ciabatta roll with jalapeño slaw and homemade dill pickles)
• Blackened Chicken Sandwich (organic blackened chicken, jalapeño slaw and garlic mayo on a Japanese milk bun)

What should we try next?

In 2017, only about 400 public schools in the state offered bilingual education.

But in the 10 years since voters approved Prop 58 overturning the ban on bilingual teaching, that number has now grown to more than 1,000.

It's still not enough to meet the demand from parents and caregivers who want their kids to have the advantages of bilingualism, as well as academic support for Spanish and other languages spoken at home.

California officials now want to increase the number of public schools to 1,600 by 2030.

“These programs have expanded quickly, but these schools continue to really struggle to find and retain the teachers to teach in them,” said Cati de los Rios, an associate professor of language, literacy, and culture at UC Berkeley.

She said the lag in the teacher pipeline is the main problem. The bilingual education ban, approved by voters in 1998 through Prop. 227, also shriveled up university training programs for bilingual teachers.

There are signs of recovery. The number of teachers trained in bilingual education in California has grown to a record of nearly 1,400 in the 2023-2024 school year.

Educators feel the momentum is growing. On Saturday, some of them are set to gather at California State University, Dominguez Hills for a yearly Bilingual Teacher Conference to take advantage of that energy.

“It's a celebration … to highlight the importance and the beauty of being bilingual and supporting our students and our families and our communities to really embrace bilingualism,” said Elexia Reyes-McGovern, a professor of teacher education at the campus.

The keynote speaker, she said, will talk about how teachers can nurture students’ thinking about mathematics in English and a second language.

Other languages

A report out this year signaled that the vast majority of the bilingual education teacher graduates received training to teach Spanish and English, but the number of graduates across the state authorized to teach other languages, such as Mandarin, Vietnamese and Armenian also grew.

Leslie Cortes Sanchez, a 2023 - 2024 bilingual education teacher trainee in UC Berkeley’s Teacher Education program, in a California classroom.

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“[I taught] two sisters and they were twins, and they came from Guatemala,” said Cristal Guadarrama, who teaches fifth grade Spanish-English dual language in South L.A.

She crafted a lesson one day, she says, around those students’ indigenous language, in particular the word for table, which was similar to the Spanish word.

“That was showing the other kids, like, ‘oh wow, there's so many similarities within the language. It's just like a change of letters.’ So then they started wanting to learn,” she said.

Research shows students in bilingual programs attend school more regularly and help recent immigrants enter all-English classes faster than without bilingual support.

California’s been engaged in a policy back and forth with bilingualism and multilingualism for over 150 years. For now, the anniversary of Prop. 58’s approval suggests a future that’s more embracing of non-English languages as an asset to learning, rather than a liability.

“We've changed the mindset of this kind of linguistic supremacy of English-only monolingualism being the present and the future,” de los Rios said.

Lawmakers and the governor on Monday failed to extend a state grant program that helped schools upgrade their air conditioner systems, a decision that will allow utilities that funded the program to claw back funds for their ratepayers.

The California Schools Healthy Air, Plumbing and Efficiency program — CalSHAPE for short — set aside nearly $1 billion in utility funds to help schools assess and upgrade aging HVAC and plumbing systems. But the California Energy Commission abruptly closed applications in 2024, leaving $191 million unused — money that must now be returned to utilities by law.

After last-minute negotiations, lawmakers passed a budget trailer bill giving schools that had already received funding an additional three years to finish projects before the state claws back the money. But they dropped a separate measure that would have reopened applications for schools to make upgrades because it did not have support from Gov. Gavin Newsom, according to sources familiar with the negotiations.

“I don't understand why [Newsom] doesn't have the backs of everyday people in California, and why he doesn't think that children deserve a safe place to learn with air conditioning,” said Leah Stokes, a political science associate professor at UC Santa Barbara who has advocated for the program. “This is all on him.”

Diana Crofts-Pelayo, a spokesperson for the governor, declined to comment on the matter.

‘A disillusioning conclusion’ 

School administrators have praised CalSHAPE, saying the program offered schools the chance to improve class environments for students.

The program helped more than 4,500 schools assess the status of their HVAC systems. Of those, 172 schools made significant upgrades with program funds.

But the program’s future has been in question since 2024, when the California Energy Commission abruptly stopped accepting applications. Much of the controversy centered on whether ratepayers should be responsible for funding a school grant program.

Consumer advocates said the program doesn’t directly benefit ratepayers, while school advocates questioned why the state would pull back money already designated for schools.

In its June 2024 notice pausing the program, the commission cited budget constraints. Later that year, the governor signed an executive order directing the commission to examine ratepayer-supported programs “whose funding might more appropriately come from a source other than ratepayers.”

In a letter opposing the budget measure to extend CalSHAPE, San Diego Gas & Electric Senior Vice President Mitch Mitchell said its customers contributed about $189.6 million to the program.

The company stands to get back $100 million — the most of any participating utility — which would amount to about $24 per customer, divided into $2 monthly payments over a year, according to a legislative analysis. Utility officials said they are committed to returning all unspent funds to customers through bill relief.

“Policymakers cannot credibly elevate affordability while simultaneously redirecting unused customer dollars away from bill relief,” Mitchell said in the letter. “If affordability is truly a legislative priority, then these funds should be returned to customers as intended under existing law.”

School advocates questioned whether returning the money would make any meaningful impact for ratepayers. SoCal Edison ratepayers would receive $1.25 per month for a year and Pacific Gas & Electric customers would receive 20 cents per month for a year, according to the legislative analysis.

Meanwhile, the CalSHAPE-funded assessments revealed HVAC systems in California schools are aging and in disrepair.

“Extending CalSHAPE deadlines so existing funds could go to repair or replace broken school HVAC systems should have been an easy win,” said JuNelle Harris, founder of Clean Air Allies, a nonprofit that advocates for healthy air in schools. “Instead, this campaign has been a multiyear saga that’s come to a disillusioning conclusion.”

Schools cope with heat 

The most recent heat wave left classrooms sweltering as many students returned for their first weeks back to school. School districts throughout the state reported having to adjust school times or cancel classes altogether.

In Los Angeles, where students endured temperatures above 90 degrees for 12 consecutive days, the Los Angeles Unified School District limited outdoor time for some students. The district received $27 million to assess their air conditioning systems from CalSHAPE but no funds for upgrades.

In San Diego, average temperatures stayed in the mid to high 80s, far above the average for the coastal city. The Coronado Unified School District shut down classes for all students.

Cody Petterson, a trustee on the board of the San Diego Unified School District, said he’s disappointed the governor would rather see CalSHAPE funds returned to ratepayers, when there is so much need for air conditioning in schools. He also criticized the CalSHAPE process, saying it limited schools from completing projects on time and disincentivized applications.

“No child should be in a classroom that is overheating because they cannot learn, they cannot achieve, they cannot grow,” he said. Petterson added that he’d prefer the state fund HVAC upgrades as categorical investments, rather than through a grant program.

San Diego Unified received $12 million to assess school air conditioning systems, but no funds to upgrade them.

Advocates said they were confused about the governor’s lack of support, but will continue to advocate for school HVAC investments from the state.

“It’s deeply disappointing that lawmakers, starting and ending with the Governor, have chosen to treat our children’s and teachers’ interests as secondary to those of big utility companies,” Harris said. “As our outdoor environment is transformed by more extreme weather events and wildfires, safe classrooms where children can learn and grow have never been more important.”

Stokes said Newsom “sat on it as an executive for years,” while disadvantaged communities went without air conditioning. “Why would he do that? Seems very Trumpian to me.”

California schools won’t be able to access more funds for upgrades, but hundreds of schools could have more time to complete projects in the works. According to the energy commission, 216 out of 719 school districts that were awarded a grant have pending projects.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The largest cyclospora food poisoning outbreak in U.S. history is over, U.S. health officials said Friday.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials said they are confident that all recalled iceberg lettuce related to this specific outbreak is off the market.

Nearly 13,000 reported cyclospora cases were tied to the multistate outbreak, federal officials say. They represent the bulk of an unprecedented surge in the parasitic diarrheal illness this year.

Even with the outbreak deemed over, several questions remain, including about its origin. The parasite is spread through human feces, and it still isn’t clear how sewage could have contaminated enough food to sicken so many people.

“This contamination can happen if produce is grown in soil or comes into contact with water that has been contaminated,” said Ellen Shumaker, director of outreach for a North Carolina State University food safety program, Safe Plates.

Since May 1, the government has received reports of nearly 20,000 lab-confirmed cases, or more than 16 times the number reported during the same period last year. More than 6,100 suspected cases also have been reported.

The worst previous year in the U.S. for infections was 2019, when about 4,700 illnesses were reported nationally.

This year’s surge in cases was dominated by an outbreak in 21 states linked to iceberg lettuce. But there are thousands of other cases that have not been linked to that outbreak.

Michigan was the hardest hit state, with the most reported cases and the two U.S. deaths tied to the outbreak.

Cyclospora is a microscopic, spherical parasite that commonly causes watery diarrhea “with frequent and sometimes explosive bowel movements,” according to the CDC. Outbreaks tend to occur most often in the late spring and summer.

The illness, called cyclosporiasis, is less common than foodborne illnesses caused by other germs, including salmonella and E. coli. Many cases are never linked to a specific food or other source.

In this outbreak, investigators initially zeroed in on lettuce served at Taco Bell. Federal officials subsequently focused on Taylor Farms as the source of the lettuce, and the company recalled iceberg lettuce grown in central Mexico.

The Taylor Farms recall involved thousands of packaged salad products combining iceberg lettuce with other vegetables. The products were shipped to major U.S. restaurant chains, including Yum Brands, which owns Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC.

The FDA has ended its on-site inspections and sample collection at iceberg lettuce growers and the processing facility in Mexico, the agency said Friday. Samples from the on-site inspections are pending analysis, the FDA said.

The outbreak cast a spotlight on a worsening problem: U.S. regulators are conducting fewer international inspections to catch contaminated produce before it lands on American plates.

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