URUAPAN, Mexico — Mexicans are worried that threats by Donald Trump to impose 25% tariffs could affect a wide range of iconic Mexican products and threaten entire regional economies.
In western Mexico, no crop supplies an income for so many small growers as avocados. But avocado growers, pickers and packers worry that U.S. consumers, faced with 25% higher prices, may just skip the guacamole.
“I think that when there is an increase in the price for any product, demand declines,” said avocado grower Enrique Espinoza. Orchards like his are the economic lifeblood in the western Mexico state of Michoacan. “It would be a tragedy if they closed down (the border) on us,” he said.
Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration — when he said he would impose tariffs — couldn’t come at a worse time: It’s around when Mexico starts shipping crates of the green fruit north for Super Bowl Sunday, the annual peak of consumption.
José Luis Arroyo Sandoval, a manager at an avocado packing house in Michoacan, says the economy would be affected.
“Work for us could decrease because it won’t be quite so attractive to export,” Arroyo said, “because avocados would get expensive, and avocados are already expensive.”
It may not just be Mexican producers who are affected; U.S. consumers may also be howling.
Mexican business leader Gina Diez Barroso told a news conference Tuesday that one U.S. agriculture official told her he had never had as many complaints as when the U.S. government halted import inspections on Mexican avocados in 2022.
“Never in his life had he had so much chaos in his office, because they halted Mexican avocados,” Diez Barroso said.
Espinoza agrees that consumers are likely to share the pain.
“The gringos need avocados, it is a good product, and I don’t think they are going to stop consuming it,” he said.
Rather, the reverse effect has him worried; if Mexico retaliates with its own tariffs, as President Claudia Sheinbaum has suggested, Mexicans will face not just a drop in income, but high prices for U.S. products like corn, which is a main supply of feed for animals in Mexico.
“There are more poor people here, so in some ways it is going to hit us,” Espinoza said. “The United States can pay 25% more for Mexican products, very few of us have enough money to pay 25% more for what we import from the United States.”
It’s not just the guacamole; Mexican tequila producers have seen a bonanza in the U.S. market. In 2023, the U.S. imported $4.6 billion worth…
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