The Berry Revolution

Non-Traditional Agriculture and Economic Opportunity in Mexico

A revolution has taken place in the produce section of U.S. supermarkets over the past two decades: year-round berries. As recently as the year 2000, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and blackberries were eaten mainly in the summer. Today, fresh berries are available any day of the year. I can attest to this: my children are raspberry addicts given to sticking them on the end of their fingertips and sucking them off in rapid succession. In February! In Wisconsin!

As I document in my ongoing book project, The Fruits of our Labor: Inclusive Upgrading in Mexico, a parallel revolution has taken place in the Mexican countryside. Vast swathes of the countryside in the Western Mexican states of Jalisco and Michoacán have been converted into highly mechanized berry production operations. These farms employ several technological interventions designed to exert absolute control over the growing environment. Tunnel-shaped plastic tents cover thousands of acres of land. Underneath these tents, berries are grown in troughs elevated from the ground, using artificial fertilizer, precise irrigation systems, and a strict regimen of pesticides, fungicides, and fertilizers. (Chemical use is much limited for organic berries, which constitute roughly ten percent of total Mexican production for export.)

US-based berry companies are the protagonists of the Mexican berry revolution, and their incursion south of the border has been enabled by a political environment favorable to foreign investment following the 1994 enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement. These firms mainly operate under a contract farming arrangement, in which the companies provide the plants and strict instructions for growing practices to landowners who convert their land to berry production and secure laborers. Growers agree to sell the harvested berries back to the berry firms upon harvest. The largest and most prominent of these firms is Driscoll’s, the company that spearheaded this contract farming model in the early 2000s in the western states of Jalisco and Michoacán.

Over 80 percent of berry production for export remains largely concentrated in these two states, with other smaller nuclei of production in Baja California, Guanajuato, and Sinaloa.

By many measures, this is a huge success story. The berry industry has grown enormously, in 2023 reaching the status of Mexico’s most valuable agricultural export—surpassing the Super Bowl duo of avocados and beer. Berry exports in 2023 approached five billion dollars.

The Mexican berry industry has generated considerable controversy, however, echoing longstanding tensions about the maquiladora industrial sector that has also boomed in post-NAFTA Mexico, in which manufacturing firms relocate to Mexico in search of cheap labor. On the one hand, many celebrate the job creation potential, as these fields employ thousands of berry pickers, often migrants from poor southern states.

For example, a comprehensive, multi-method Wilson Center report (funded by the Walmart Foundation) extolled the successful job creation of this industry:

Mexico’s export-oriented agriculture creates valuable jobs for workers with little education. The real wages of Mexican farm workers have increased and are significantly higher than Mexico’s minimum wage of 103 pesos a day; workers harvesting berries for piece rate wages often earn 200 to 300 pesos a day, two or three times the minimum wage.

On the other hand, many academics and activists have decried the noxious effects of the berry industry. The vast expanses of plastic—and clearcutting that takes place to make room—are blamed for warming temperatures and desertification of agricultural land. Water is an issue of contention, both in the usage of local towns’ water supplies and the chemical runoff from berry production. Journalists have uncovered inhumane living and working conditions. Many workers are migrant laborers, bussed to these fields by recruiters hired by berry producers. Local communities often lack the social services to absorb this migrant labor, resulting in conflicts between migrants and longstanding residents.

The Political Economy of Berries in Mexico

Amidst this contested territory, my book project zooms out to ask: What role do berries play in promoting inclusive economic development? Put another way, does berry production produce good jobs for ordinary Mexicans? Do its economic benefits trickle down to rural communities that grapple with poverty and cartel-related violence? How does the economic opportunity presented by the berry industry differ from other booming agricultural exports, such as avocados and tequila?

My central finding is that berries have mainly fallen short as a source of economic opportunity in the countryside.

Thirty years ago, at the dawn of NAFTA, about one-fourth of Mexicans worked in agriculture, primarily corn farmers. Today, the figure is less than half as much (12 percent, per the World Bank). Economic transformations of the past few decades have simply made small-scale farming unprofitable in Mexico. Berries have stepped in as an alternative, higher value crop that Mexico’s rural population may potentially turn to. However, the contract farming arrangements differ significantly from traditional grain production in several ways.

Most importantly, several obstacles prevent small-scale undercapitalized farmers from participating in this lucrative business. Berry farming has heavy upstart capital requirements, and significant downside risk of crops underperform. Berries are an especially finicky crop, with complex requirements for carefully controlled storage, shipping, and hygiene to avoid bacterial or fungal outbreaks. Cognizant of these challenges, corporations such as Driscoll’s prefer to contract with larger-scale producers. These factors combine to produce a sector that has not contributed to the growth of a rural middle class, but rather a proliferation of the segmented labor market in which low-paying jobs for agricultural workers are abundant and profits flow to MNCs and already-wealthy landowners.

Why is the sector organized this way?

A key characteristic of the berry industry in Mexico is that it is particularly lightly regulated under the North American economic community. While other crops such as avocados, corn, and orange juice were hot points of negotiation in the early 1990s establishment of NAFTA, the idea of a transnational berry trade was still relatively unexplored. As a result, the berry sector is a free-for-all with little limit on cross-border investment or trade.

This scenario stands in stark contrast to avocados, another case study in my book project. Mexico’s avocado industry features stringent regulations both by the Mexican government and under the auspices of NAFTA. Since the initiation of NAFTA, the agreement has instituted limits on the volume of avocados that can be exported to the United States. (This was initially motivated by an interest in protecting California avocado growers. Limits have increase drastically, as California avocado ranches have been converted to residential real estate and US appetites for avocado have boomed.) A Mexican association was granted an exclusive right to certify avocados for export and this association has exercised this authority to favor a privileged group of insiders—legacy avocado producers operating in a single region of Michoacán.

The Role of Producer Organizations

So if berries were left alone during NAFTA, what factors have led to the emergence of this large and unusually organized agricultural sector in Mexico?

A key focus of my research has been the ways that foreign berry companies organize in Mexico. Perhaps the most important actor in Mexico’s berry industry is the National Berry Exporters’ Association—ANEBERRIES. This association was spearheaded by Driscoll’s in 2009. According to an executive of Driscoll’s at the time of the ANEBERRIES founding, the initial goal was to uphold industry-wide standards of hygiene, environmental impact, and labor practices. Motivated by a 1996 Cyclospora outbreak in the then-nascent Guatemalan berry export industry that tanked that country’s berry sector, the hope was to ensure that berry producers and exporters throughout Mexico would hew to best practices, sustaining a strong reputation for Mexican berries.

ANEBERRIES’ services have expanded in its 15-year existence. Today, the association offers three categories of services to berry producers and exporters in Mexico. First, in line with its initial mission, ANEBERRIES offers training programs for berry farmers to uphold production standards. These training activities initially had an emphasis on sanitation to avoid infectious organisms. Over the past half decade or so, training has expanded to help producers comply with regulations posed by the Mexican government regarding labor practices on berry fields and environmental impacts of production. Second, ANEBERRIES has expanded its scope of influence transitionally, engaging in trade advocacy on behalf of the berry industry in the United States. Finally, ANEBERRIES serves as an intermediary for networking among berry producers and the copious complementary services: producers of inputs (seeds, chemicals, fertilizers); technology for production (greenhouses, irrigation systems); financial services; labor; etc.

In July 2022, I attended the annual ANEBERRIES convention and encountered the wide variety of services and actors that pertain to the association. The keynote speech, delivered by Miguel Ángel Curiel, the founding president of ANEBERRIES—and now Vice President of Driscoll’s—emphasized the enormous room for continued growth.

Scene from presentation at the 12th Annual Congress of ANEBERRIES, July 28, 2022. Photo by Brian Palmer-Rubin

ANEBERRIES is quite innovative and goes against the expectations of most research on multi-national corporations. We tend to think of foreign firms as relatively dis-organized in host countries. For instance, the much-studied maquiladora manufacturing sector offers plenty of examples of individual firms—say, Ford Motors Company—making demands on local governments for concessions in order to situate a factory (e.g. tax breaks, subsidies). However, industrial firms from the Global North have historically eschewed organizing in Mexico, likely viewing it as excessively costly.

What ANEBERRIES demonstrates is that in cases where the state is absent in providing regulatory institutions to govern transnational supply chains, the foreign firms themselves may find it in their interest to step up and build the institutions themselves. And while this association has been quite successful at blazing a path for the multi-national dominated berry sector, efforts to promote a more inclusive model for berry production have gone to the wayside.

What are the Alternatives?

If we’re concerned about promoting an inclusive development model in Mexico—featuring widespread participation in modern globalized industries such as berries—we may ask what role for berries?

As often is the case when searching for success cases, we can learn quite a lot by glancing on the other side of the Pacific to the late-twentieth century East Asian miracles of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. (These “success cases” loom so large that I often joke that the subtitle of my Political Economy of Development class should be “How did South Korea do it?”)

One underappreciated aspect of these cases is the role of agricultural policy as an element in these countries’ emerging high-tech manufacturing sectors. (These policies are well documented in Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works.) While such firms as Toyota, Hyundai, and Asus were laying the groundwork to becoming household names worldwide, these countries’ governments supported—with copious subsidies and training programs—the masses of their citizens to remain in the countryside and produce high value, labor-intensive crops, such as watermelon, mushroom, and squash on very small plots of land.

High-value, small-scale agricultural production helped create a rural middle class, which absorbed excess labor during a period when manufacturing could only employ a small percentage of workers. Rural farmers served as an early consumer base for these burgeoning industrial sectors. And agricultural exports helped provide the much-needed foreign capital to invest in factories and urban infrastructure.

Definitively, Mexico did not follow the East Asian model in this regard. Mexico’s experience with industrialization in the mid-twentieth century was accompanied by massive urban population flows. Small-scale agricultural production became all-but-impossible as a basis for a decent standard of living. Agricultural subsidies were overwhelmingly concentrated in industrialized farming operations of cheap wheat and corn in Northern Mexico. Small-scale farmers that remained in the countryside engaged in subsistence farming, supplementing their meager incomes with low-skill non-agricultural employment and government anti-poverty programs.

This trajectory only accelerated following the adoption of NAFTA, when cheap US-grown corn began to flood the Mexican market, undercutting any last hope of traditional agricultural production as a viable way of life. Today, rural Mexico is a site of numerous social ills: In many towns, most of the young and ambitious residents have migrated, either to Mexican cities or to the United States in search of work. And throughout the territory, the dominant economic and coercive actor is organized crime.

It’s perhaps too early to tell whether high-value agricultural exports such as berries and avocados can play a role in reversing the fate of small-scale farmers in Mexico. On the one hand, these industries are bringing huge economic windfalls. Significant support and regulation by the government will likely be needed to assure that these economic benefits extend beyond the privileged few.

Brian Palmer-Rubin is Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California. He studies interest representation, political economy of development, and accountability institutions, with a central focus on Mexico. His first book, Evading the Patronage Trap: Interest Representation in Mexico, was published in 2022 by University of Michigan Press.