Faced with climate change and cheap competition from countries like China, the American pine nut trade shows no signs of recovery.
Long a staple food for Native American tribes in the Southwest, including the Navajo and Apache, 8 million pounds of pine nuts were wild-harvested in 1942, from New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona. “By the 1920s, native nuts were being shipped to the nation’s big cities by the ton. By the 1930s, they were listed on the Chicago Commodities Exchange,” says Civil Eats.
But the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service started destroying thousands of acres of piñon-juniper woodland to make way for better timber trees in the 1950s, before later clearing even more land for cattle. Ironically, at $40 per pound American pine nuts could be a more lucrative product than beef.
A “healthy piñon forest can generate $4,000 to $10,000 per acre, when one acre of forest produces 250 pounds of nuts. Compare this to rangeland, which generates approximately $168 to $288 per acre, but also requires extensive tax subsidies,” says Civil Eats.
Climate change has made the pine nut situation even bleaker, since the trees are extremely sensitive to drought and high temperatures. It has become increasingly hard for harvesters to gather a crop each year — the nuts are still collected in the wild by a handful of people.
Meanwhile, China, which sells its pine nuts at around $25 per pound, “exported 76 percent of the world’s pine nuts in 2015. Though Chinese pine nuts are also gathered on public lands, the cost of labor is a fraction of the cost in the U.S,” says Civil Eats.