Costa Rica is Now the World's Top Pineapple Exporter

When we say Costa Rica, what comes to mind? Volcanoes? Beautiful beaches and natural parks? Monkeys? All of the above?

Try pineapples—the country is the world’s top player. Costa Rica exported 2.5M metric tons of pineapples in 2020, more than major Asian exporters like the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia, as well as the entire continent of Africa.

That’s right: Costa Rica, with its roughly 5M people, exports more pineapples than the world’s 2nd-largest continent. In terms of land area, we probably don’t need to tell you Africa is larger, but just for fun we crunched the numbers — it’s about 593x larger.

What’s extra crazy is that it hasn’t always been this way. Pineapple is native to the area straddling the Brazilian–Paraguayan border, but was dispersed throughout the hemisphere by Native Americans. The fruit’s success with Old World colonial elites in Europe led to its global popularity, but Costa Rica only began producing significant amounts by the end of the 20th century. An explosion of exports in the last 2 decades has led to the pineapple becoming Costa Rica’s 4th-largest export.

Naturally, the news isn’t all good. Insecticides used to protect pineapple farms can be harmful for workers, often from neighboring Nicaragua, who are generally underpaid given the industry’s success. Not to mention, pineapple exports can be lucrative, but overdependence can leave a country vulnerable to price shocks and beholden to foreign interests. Central America has a rotten history with the economic impacts of fruit harvesting—we want to see Costa Rica rise above and continue to set a sustainable example for the region.

If you’re a longtime Latinometrics reader, you’re probably used to us breaking the stories of a Latin American country that leads global exports in a particular fruit. Whether it be Peruvian blueberries or Mexican raspberries, we love to see the region’s countries taking a central role in the world’s markets.

In this spirit, we applaud Costa Rica’s pineapple explosion since the turn of the century. May our Tico friends see the fruits of their labor!