As a kid I wondered if limes were just ripe lemons. As an adult, I wonder why Mexican drug cartels were able to extort lime producers to the point that prices skyrocketed and supply shortages occurred.
From the cartel's point of view, I can understand why they would want to extort the farming industry. It’s lucrative, and it’s also a form of diversification. The story from the consumers’ point of view is less understandable. At the time of the price increase and shortage, the United States got 98 percent of all its limes from one region in Mexico. This is actually a fairly common practice in agriculture. A lot of the fruits and vegetables you see in the produce section come from one place, usually California, Florida or Mexico.
This isn’t inherently a bad thing, especially with produce that is hard to keep fresh for long periods of time, but it can lead to exploitation throughout the value chain. If buyers of limes, or any other fruit, only care about prices, then we may have to confront some morally troubling situations.
So I think one of the questions that needs to be asked is: Why don’t we care? Is it really true that we are willing to buy anything for a low price no matter the conditions in which it was produced? Are we just misinformed about the things that we buy? Maybe people are just lazy, and when they decide to go healthy, they buy whatever fruit they like without thinking about where it came from.
Are there too many things to think about? It’s also possible that people shelve their morality for the things they feel they can’t live without. Or maybe, like me, they quickly realize after doing research that you can find something wrong with just about everything you eat if you look hard enough. Unless you grow everything you eat yourself, it's hard to stand on the moral high ground when it comes to food.
So what can we can do? We have to stop blatant injustice wherever we see it, but we also have to make sure that we have food security and stability. The need for a balanced diet also means we have to bring in fruit and vegetables from elsewhere. The solution cannot be to cut off the rest of the world, not if we want a healthy population.
Food dilemmas are difficult, complex and not easily solved. That does not mean, however, that we should continue to ignore those dilemmas. If we have the power to make things better, we should. If we can grow avocados and limes in a way that drug cartels cannot make a profit on them shouldn’t we do everything we could to make that a reality? It’s hard to do that as a single consumer, but if enough of us start asking questions, and demanding results, then maybe we can affect some change in the world.