I don't know if this is my imagination, but in the past year it seems to me that pistachios are popping up everywhere: Starbucks has a pistachio latte apparently? Everyone's talking about Dubai chocolate, which is filled with pistachio cream? There are even pistachio-based beauty products?? It's weird. And suspicious..
But if we zoom out this isn't something unusual: agricultural trends happen all the time. And they all have something behind them. The avocado-toast craze was heavily promoted by the Hass Avocado Board. The almond milk craze? Yup, marketed by the Almond Board of California. The largest growers in the country fund their operations. These are powerful. Lots of money. Lots of political influence.
The new pistachio-in-everything craze is the same story. The American Pistachio Board is largely responsible for it. They work actively to promote pistachios as an ingredient for coffee, ice cream, baked goods, etc. They even run marketing campaigns in China, India, the EU, and the Middle East for export.
There's nothing inherently wrong with this. It's not a bad thing that farmers have groups to represent them to help sell their products. Buuuut if we look a little deeper, we begin to see some other stuff.
The biggest funder of the American Pistachio Board is The Wonderful Company, the parent company of Wonderful Pistachios, the largest pistachio farm in the US: 65,000 acres of nothin' but pistachios. Available at your nearest Costco! It's owned by the billionaire Resnick family, the same owners of Fiji Water and POM pomegranate juice. They grow 20% of America's pistachios, the vast majority of which come from about 5 total farms. Together they dominate global pistachio production: 55% of the world's pistachios come from a small handful of American farms today.
Pistachios are not native to California, where about 98% of American pistachios are grown. They are native to Iran. Iran was dominant in the global pistachio trade for most of the 20th century up until the early 2000s. It was their second most important export after oil and gas. A major cash crop for the country. They grew half of the world's pistachios by the early 2000s, and the US only produced around 12% at the time. Now, Iran only produces around 20%. So what happened in the span of a decade or two?
In the 1980s the then American Pistachio Commission, which later became the American Pistachio Board mentioned above, lobbied the US government to impose an anti-dumping tariff on Iranian pistachios: Raegan's Commerce Department determined the Iran sold pistachios to the US far below fair market value, so the administration imposed a 241% tariff (odd-number, I know) in 1986 on Iranian pistachios.
The timing was perfect. Pistachios take years to produce, and California farmers had planted a lot of pistachio trees in the 1970s. The trees were beginning to produce. California farmers gradually bought more and more land, planted more and more trees. Hedge funds aided in the expansion and still invest in pistachio orchards, benefitting pension funds. Wonderful Pistachios, in order to keep their trees hydrated, even bought the state owned Kern Water Bank during California's water privatization deals in the 1990s. All of this secured the rise of American pistachio production and the decline of Iranian dominance.
Iran simply could not compete globally with the efficiencies that come with American agricultural concentration. While the US has less than a thousand farms each producing a lot, Iran has tens of thousands of farms each producing a little. There are structural inefficiencies that come with this. The largest pistachio farms in the US are vertically integrated: they own the farm, the processing center, and the distribution networks. In Iran, each farm is too small to have such infrastructure, so each farmer has to sell the raw product to a processor, who sells it to a packager, who sells it to an exporter. The US, due to this centralization, can export to China and other countries at a much more consistent, uniform quality than can Iran. Just as in the local supermarket where all the fruit and veggies look the same, uniformity is what is sought out in the global trade of pistachios. Even though Iranian pistachios are cheaper and more delicious, uniformity is preferred.
This type of agriculture, while it's efficient and effective on a global scale, over time results in environmental degradation and wealth concentration (this isn't to say that Iran doesn't have huge farms that are tied to power: one of them is owned by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former billionaire president of Iran). This is the way things are. While the second law of thermodynamics states that systems become more disordered over time, it seems as if the first law of global trade states that industries become more ordered and structured over time.
My hope is that this law isn't written in stone. I've been talking to some small, organic pistachio farmers out West. So far I haven't found one I like. If I find one, I'll let you know.