AUSTIN, Texas — The headline was as jarring as the thought: We will run out of avocados in three weeks if President Donald Trump closes the Mexico border.
It had a lot of us talking on Monday, so we decided to verify.
We used information from the USDA and the Department of Commerce, and we did find that if President Trump closes the border, imports could be affected and we may notice prices rise.
According to the USDA, Mexico supplies 44 percent of the imported produce to the United States and 48.5 percent of the world's avocados.
In 2017, the United States imported $2.6 billion in fresh avocados and exported approximately $28,500 in fresh avocados.
Running out of avocados is unlikely. The trees keep producing the fruit.
We do get most of our avocados from Mexico (78 percent), but they also come from California, Florida, Peru, Chile and Spain. And the California crop is just now appearing in stores.
So we can verify that it is possible any imported avocados from Mexico could be disrupted, but it is unlikely that we would run out.
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