One avocado grown in Chile’s Valparaíso region, which includes Petorca province, has been estimated to require roughly 320 litres of applied fresh water. The global average is closer to 70 litres. So the same fruit can require more than four times as much irrigation water in this dry part of Chile.
The easy version of this story blames the avocado. It’s a “thirsty” fruit, the story goes, so eating it quietly drains a country in drought. That framing is popular, and it’s mostly wrong. The water figures aren’t exaggerated. But the finger gets pointed at the plant instead of at how scarce water has been allocated and managed.
The 70-litre figure is a rough global average for applied fresh water used to grow one avocado, not its total water footprint including rainfall. In Chile’s Valparaíso region, the irrigation requirement is far higher. The Danish investigative outlet Danwatch found that producers there use about 1,280 litres of applied fresh water per kilogram of avocados, working out to roughly 320 litres for a single fruit. At the time of its investigation, over 60% of Chile’s avocados were grown in this region.
Why so much more here? Partly the climate. Petorca sits on dry hillsides north of Santiago and has endured prolonged drought. But agricultural expansion matters too. According to Rodrigo Mundaca of MODATIMA, the area of the valley devoted to avocado plantations grew from roughly 2,000 hectares in the late 1990s to more than 16,000 by the time PBS reported on the issue in 2019.
Follow the fruit and much of it ends up overseas. Chile exports avocados primarily to the United States and Europe, with the Netherlands serving as an important European entry point. In the 2017/18 marketing year, the Netherlands alone received 40% of Chilean avocado exports. The industry’s water demand therefore supports an export crop consumed far beyond the valleys where it is grown.
That’s what makes the local picture so stark. In Petorca, thousands of residents have depended on water delivered by tanker trucks. A 2020 study found that more than 2,000 people recorded by the municipality depended on tanker supplies, around 20% of the Petorca basin’s population.
Residents were at times allocated just 50 litres per person per day, delivered by tanker truck, for drinking, cooking, washing and other needs.
A piece of law sits at the center of the history: Chile’s 1981 Water Code. It created transferable water-use rights that could be held separately from ownership of the land. Danwatch reported that the right to pump one litre of water per second in Petorca, roughly what a hectare of avocado trees needs, had sold for around US$14,500.
Large plantations acquired rights to scarce water, and in some cases went further than the law allowed. Danwatch documented plantations that had been convicted of water-code violations involving illegal extraction.
Rodrigo Mundaca, an agronomist and spokesperson for MODATIMA, put the campaign’s argument bluntly: “The water for the people and the small farmers has disappeared, but there’s water enough for the big avocado plantations.” That’s his interpretation of how the shortage broke down, rather than a settled explanation of the drought, which researchers have attributed to a combination of severe climatic drought and water management.
The legal picture is no longer the same as it was when the Petorca controversy became internationally prominent. In April 2022, Chile enacted Law 21.435, a major reform of the Water Code. The revised law declares access to drinking water and sanitation an essential human right and states that human consumption, household subsistence and sanitation must take priority when water rights are granted or restricted.
That does not erase Petorca’s history or automatically resolve shortages, but the reform explicitly strengthened the state’s ability to prioritize human consumption while balancing ecological preservation and productive uses.
The people closest to the dispute have argued that the fix is primarily legal and institutional, not simply dietary. Mundaca has said the campaign is not anti-avocado. “We are not against avocados. We want avocados to reach markets in Europe and the United States,” he said, while arguing that exports should not come at the cost of access to water.
A shopper can buy fewer avocados, but choices at the till cannot by themselves rewrite water law, enforce extraction limits or decide how scarce supplies are allocated during drought. Petorca’s crisis was shaped by climate, agricultural expansion and a water-rights system that Chile has since begun to reform.