Market events

US suspension of Mexican avocado imports from Michoacan (February 2022)

Feb 2022: a documented market event that overlapped the wholesale price windows of 1 tracked ingredient — co-occurrence in time, never an asserted cause.

What happened

On Feb 11, 2022, USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) suspended inspections of Mexican avocados in Michoacan — the only Mexican state then authorized to export avocados to the US, supplying the large majority of US avocado imports — after an APHIS inspector received a threat while carrying out field work near Uruapan. With inspections paused, avocado shipments from Michoacan halted. USDA lifted the suspension on Feb 18, 2022 after additional inspector-safety measures were agreed with Mexican authorities and the exporters' association.

Documented account from our open, cited registry (sources below). Shown as context beside the price record — co-occurrence in time, never an asserted cause.

Affected ingredients

Why these ingredients were exposed

Each affected ingredient's public supply structure — where it comes from and how much it leans on imports. Context that makes the co-occurrence with a documented event legible, never its cause.

  • AvocadoImport-exposed its import value concentrates in a few origins (88% Mexico · 6% Peru, HHI 0.78, a value share), at ~88% reliance by value. That is why an event in that origin region overlaps its price window legibly.

Reliance is a share of import value, a rough exposure proxy, not a supply-security score; origin concentration (HHI) is of import value, not total supply. It explains why an ingredient sits in the path of a documented event — not that the event caused any price move. Co-occurrence in time, never a cause.

The detected moves that overlapped

Each figure is a wholesale reference against its own ±26-week normal — a market move, never a delivered price.

No sustained wholesale move in our detected set falls inside this event's window. The event is documented; our public price series simply didn't flag a notable departure from normal for these ingredients then — an honest absence, not a hidden one.

What moved together

Co-occurrence, not cause

Avocado

In Avocado's 6 notable moves, these ingredients ran the same direction in the same weeks:

  1. Acorn squash2 of 6 moves
  2. Bell pepper2 of 6 moves
  3. Brussels sprouts2 of 6 moves
  4. Carrot2 of 6 moves
  5. Snow peas2 of 6 moves

Moving in the same weeks is not one thing causing another — many of these share a growing region, a shipping lane, or an aisle. It is a directed, bounded count: in K of an ingredient's own notable moves, another ran the same way.

Sources

3 sources

Documented events come from our open, cited registry (CC‑BY). Price moves are detected from public history (USDA/BLS/FRED) and shown as co-occurring context, never asserted as the cause. How events are picked.