Hello there, fellow avocado lovers and blockchain enthusiasts!

In this blog post we’re going to talk about the bad press that the avocado has received in recent years.

The avocado, also known by its scientific name Persea americana, is a fruit native to Mexico and Guatemala that belongs to the Laureaceae family. The special climatic conditions that the fruit needs to grow mean that it can practically only be cultivated in tropical and Mediterranean climates.

More than 60 countries produce around 500 varieties of avocados, with Mexico being the world’s largest producer with 2 million tonnes produced per year, followed by the Dominican Republic with 690,000 tonnes, Colombia with 550,000 tonnes and Peru with 525,000 tonnes. However, if we look outside the American continent, we can also find large producers such as Indonesia, Kenya, Israel, China and South Africa. In the case of Europe it is Spain at the forefront, with the autonomous community of Andalusia dominating the scarce production and exports of avocados to the rest of Europe, leaving the Portuguese Algarve, Sicily and Crete as mere token producers within the EU.

At this point we might ask – what does the future hold for avocados? Well, recent data from the WAO (World Avocado Organisation) only confirms the general sense of growing interest for the fruit throughout the world. A few years ago, the US already exceeded 1 million tonnes of imports per year, a figure that the EU is likely to reach by 2025, if not sooner, according to current predictions. If we add to this the new players such as Asia (increasingly open to introducing avocados into their diet), it is then not surprising that there is growing concern at a global level about the potential worsening of problems such as water shortages, deforestation and criminal groups, who extort and illegally appropriate land in some areas of the American continent, such as the Chilean province of Petorca and the Mexican state of Michoacán.

At Avocate, we understand and share society’s concern over such issues, and although every year steps are taken to optimise water irrigation systems and use real-time data analysis – having reduced water usage from 1000 L/kg of avocado to an average of 600 L/kg –  this does not mean that maximum efficiency has yet been reached. Thus, further research is still required to improve these efficiencies. Now, such figures may seem large, but don’t be so quick to judge: all food needs water in its production. For example, to obtain just one kg of chocolate, you need more than 17,000 litres, and we don’t hear quite so many people complaining about that…

To conclude, we would like to stress the importance of creating more sustainable food systems, and of educating consumers to demand international fair trade certifications and sustainably-produced avocado from their local supermarkets; thus ensuring that their purchases do not support deforestation, organised crime nor the exploitation of natural water sources.

                                                                                              May the power of the green gold guide you!