US importers sued for 'greenwashing' Mexican avocados

Political groups are the cartels, what we know as cartels are their customer service employees.

The biggest proof is the consistent unwillingness of governments to stop them in any effective way, and I'm not talking about drugs only.

I don't eat Mexican avocados, I buy the more expensive ones grown in the US because of the cartels.

I don't think US American avocado farmers are committing war crimes.

This joke I saw on Reddit about avocado ripeness says it all IMO:

avocado: not ripe

avocado: not ripe

avocado: not ripe

avocado: I'M RIPE NOW

avocado: OK you were in the bathroom so I rotted

"In the California Bay Area, We don't have avocados in a box, nor perfectly ripe. They are usually in a pile and quite un-ripe (which helps reduce denting in the pile). Depending on size, quality, and organic status they range from about ~1 to ~2.50 each."

Same in the Chicagoland area.

These are small. But delicious.

OK, that is much less expensive than I expected.

Oh, and I should have been more clear. These are "perfectly ripe, in a box" fancy style. Edited gp.

I wasn't a Costco shopper. More of a QFC dude. But are those fancy "perfect" Hass?

If so, I wonder if I created a false memory based on the whole "skip avocado toast" meme, or something.

Avocados have long been sold in bags of quantity 5 at Costco, and prices have been at least $9 per bag in WA state, if not $10 and $11 for the past year or two.

Used to be $6 or $7 for 5 avocados around 2020. You can see in store prices in the Costco app now. Currently, the Kirkland, WA Costco says $9 for 5 avocados.

I'm so tired of this.

Here, watch this: I'm the US government with the most powerful military and surveillance network on the planet with multiple deployed floating cities. You give me a list of every supplier you use and I will recursively go down that list and every employee they have and if you use slaves to harvest materials at any point, I shut down your entire business and burn every shippng crate of stock until you get a supplier that doesn't use slaves. If you lie, I ship the executives to one of numerous black sites under my control. If we're going to do it to innocent people, shipping them to God knows what death camp without due process, I'm not going to sit here and listen anymore about this "we can't do that" nonsense about our supply chain.

Woah, crazy, slavery solved.

At least have the balls to tell me you want cheap avocados and don't care if child slaves pick them. I'm so God damn tired of all the excuses and smoke and mirrors.

> My only experience with this sort of tracking is compliance with "Conflict Minerals" reporting, and from that I can tell you that tracking and verifying the origin of any commodity or bulk good is nearly impossible to accomplish reliably.

This is a better written and more eloquent version of the same excuse I was ranting about in my comment. And I'm afraid my response is not as eloquent:

Bull. Shit.

This is an eminently solvable issue. Make the executives of whatever corporation personally, criminally responsible for the slavery found in their supply chain, and then: Watch the problem be solved. No, I don't know the specifics of how you do it. That's not my job. But we put men on the moon, for Christ's sake. We, creatures not gifted by nature with wings, have the ability to fly at (mostly) reasonable cost, to such a degree where the inconveniences involved in it make it boring to discuss. Everyone in the west moves around in metal boxes with smaller metal boxes within them in which we blow up fuel and air in precise mixes to travel upwards of 80 mph, largely safely. You're telling me the collected knowledge of our species cannot be leveraged to make sure that little kids aren't doing resource extraction!?

> and nobody wants to pay for the cost of verification.

THAT is the real problem, and that's also solvable by the above. I bet the executives at these companies will open the business's purse REAL FAST when it's their, actual physical ass on the line, and not just a paltry fine and firm finger-wagging from the Government.

In reply to the comment below:

> But how do you actually verify the source? Let’s assume that some amount of conflict metals are laundered through other countries, and commingled with ‘clean’ material (which is usually how it happens); how do you figure out whether your supplier is using this material? Do you just trust any documentation they provide? If not, what is it that you’d do?

I mean this is actually one application of crypto that I didn't think was brain-dead stupid. I read a paper about the potential of using blockchains to verify the integrity of materials in supply chains.

More to the point though: I said, I don't know how it's done. But I guaran-damn-tee you that if the corpos will be charged, legally, personally, for the finding of slavery in supply chains, that they will figure it out and fucking quick.

And, even moreso, once you raise the consequences of those "lapses" in ethics to such a degree, it's highly probable that the dubious sources will either improve or shut down entirely, because there will be no corporation in the West ready to do business with them anymore. The risk is simply too high for those in charge of said corporations. They will pay whatever it costs to have materials that are from properly vetted sources.

And of course, I'm not a child, there will still be issues, none of this is a silver bullet for any of it, and there will always be bad actors acting badly. However we still have murders, and we don't just... fine murderers $500 and tell them they better not do it again, despite the fact that we can't catch them all. We catch them and we punish them.

Many consumers don't have the time or luxury to know. We're in the "give them bread" phase. We already heavily subsidize many parts of the food chain to keep people happy. Nobody wants to do anything politically that might cause food prices to go up.

Oh, ok. Remind me, what food staples are ethical and healthy?

That's not a solution, it's defeatist horseshit. I want avocados. I don't want avocado growers to be able to hide their environmental impact. I want lithium batteries. I don't want kids mining lithium. I want animal products. I don't want animals needlessly tortured in factory farms.

I don't feel like I'm asking for the fucking moon here.

I mean we used to have a strong Avocado industry here in the states before NAFTA. Which reminds me I have to go cut one of the dead Avocado trees in my back from those days.