Americans’ love for avocado destroys Mexican forests – 12/16/2023 – Environment

Trucks arrived carrying armed men towards the top of a mountain shrouded in fog, and soon after the flames spread, devastating a forest of towering pine and oak trees.

Then, last year, the trucks returned, but this time they carried rooted avocado trees that had been scattered across the ridge, where townspeople used to forage for mushrooms when it was still covered in trees.

“We have never witnessed a fire of this magnitude before,” said Maricela Baca Yépez, 46, a municipal employee and longtime resident of Patuán, a city nestled in the volcanic highlands where the Purépecha people of Mexico have lived for centuries.

Forests are being devastated at a dizzying rate in western Mexico, and while deforestation in places like the Amazon rainforest or Borneo is driven by cattle ranching, gold mining and palm oil farms, here, in this area of rich biodiversity, it is fueled by the huge US appetite for avocados.

Many interests from criminal gangs, landowners, corrupt local officials and community leaders are involved in clearing forests to plant avocados. In some cases, private land is confiscated without government authorization. Virtually all deforestation for avocado production over the past two decades may have violated Mexican law, which prohibits “changes in land use” without government authorization.

Since the United States began importing avocados from Mexico less than 40 years ago, consumption has soared, encouraged by marketing campaigns promoting it as a heart-healthy food and by steady demand for dishes like avocado toast, temakis and sushi, resulting in consumption of the fruit three times greater than two decades ago.

South of the U.S. border, satisfying the hunger for avocados comes at a high cost, according to environmental and human rights activists: the loss of forests, dwindling underground water supplies and an increase in violence fueled by criminal gangs who compete for the profitable business.

And although the United States and Mexico signed a UN agreement in 2021 to “halt and reverse” deforestation by 2030, annual avocado trade between the two countries, which averages around US$2.7 billion, casts doubt on these climate promises.

According to documents obtained by Climate Rights International, a nonprofit organization focused on how human rights violations contribute to climate change, Mexican environmental authorities asked the United States to prevent the entry of avocados grown on deforested land, but no action was taken by the United States. Americans.

In a new report, the group identified dozens of cases of plantations in deforested areas that supply avocados to US food distributors, who in turn sell them to the country’s main supermarket chains. Fresh Del Monte, one of the largest American distributors of the fruit, said the industry supports reforestation projects in Mexico.

In a statement, however, the company also stated that it “does not have plantations in Mexico” and that it relies on “industry collaboration” to ensure that producers comply with local legislation.

As elsewhere, deforestation of Mexico’s mixed pine and oak forests and oyamel fir forests reduces carbon storage, releasing climate-warming gases. But clear-cutting for avocado production, which requires large amounts of water, has triggered another crisis by draining aquifers, which are indispensable for many farmers.

A mature avocado tree requires as much water as it takes to maintain 14 mature pine trees, said Jeff Miller, author of the book “Avocado: A Global History”: “Replacing deciduous forests, which have very thirsty trees, with conifer forests, which don’t need as much water. water means ruining the environment.”

In regions of Mexico that are already under tension because of turf wars between drug cartels, the loss of forests is fueling new conflicts and raising concerns that Mexican authorities are largely allowing illegal loggers and avocado growers to operate without punishment. .

As soon as these plantations appear in deforested areas, illegal wells appear nearby, with water transported through a labyrinthine system of plastic pipes that often steal the water supply from farmers growing traditional crops such as tomatoes or corn.

Avocado has been consumed in the region for thousands of years. Its temperate slopes with porous soil of volcanic origin offer ideal conditions for cultivation, but industrial-scale production for export began only in the 1990s, when Mexico pressured the United States to end the ban on importing avocados, after opening the market for American corn itself.

Today the country supplies approximately 90% of the avocados sent to the United States. In Michoacán, this industry employs more than 300,000 workers in the state, which has a population of 4.8 million, according to government data.

The powerful association representing the Mexican avocado industry acknowledged that deforestation is a problem but declared it is being addressed, including training and equipping forest fire brigades to provide early warning when fires start.

“No one wants an economic driver like Michoacán’s avocado to go away,” said the association’s director, Armando López Orduña.

But in practice, some police say local corruption leads to major forest degradation. Last month, an official from the Michoacán state prosecutor’s office for environmental crimes, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, told two reporters from The New York Times that the environmental unit had been warned by supervisors not to investigate avocado plantations. with more than five hectares, even in the case of a complaint.

In this context, owners needed to pay bribes to supervisors, with amounts proportional to the size of the cultivation. José Jesús Reyes Mozqueda, state environmental prosecutor, did not respond directly to the bribery allegations, but stated that the office had conducted several investigations into allegations of illegal deforestation related to avocados.

In Michoacán, more than 10,000 hectares of fruit plantations that are authorized to export to the United States are on lands that, until 2014, were covered by forests, according to environmental geographers at the University of Texas at Austin. (The planting must be inspected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture before a packer can process the avocados for export, although the inspection focuses on pest control, not the legality of the land.)

In 2021, Mexican environmental officials sent a letter to a regional manager at the US Department of Agriculture proposing to change an agreement governing the export of Mexican avocados, aiming to ensure that they did not come from illegally deforested land, but nothing happened.

“The request was ignored,” said Daniel Wilkinson, senior advisor at Climate Rights International. A department spokesperson said “the lack of response to this letter is a ministerial oversight and does not reflect a political issue.”

But, in 2022, US authorities amended the agreement to authorize Jalisco — the second largest avocado producing state in Mexico — to begin exporting the fruit.

In western Mexico, in interviews with farmers with The New York Times, government officials and indigenous leaders showed how local people fighting deforestation and water theft become targets of intimidation, kidnappings and shootings.

With little outside help, activists often say they are waging a lonely and dangerous campaign. At Villa Madero in Michoacán, an activist who requested anonymity for security reasons described how in 2021 he was kidnapped and beaten before being released.

Purépecha leaders from Zirahuén, another city in Michoacán, reported that armed men from a local criminal group broke into their homes and kidnapped them in 2019 after they objected to the division of community land for avocado planting.

A Purépecha man who was also a victim of kidnapping and who asked not to be identified out of fear for his safety, said that a gun was pointed at his head. “The avocado you eat in the United States is bathed in blood,” he summarized.

Donaciano Arévalo, 60, who was a character in another episode near the city of Zacapu, in Michoacán, and who said he had been threatened, made the rare decision to insist on identifying himself. He said that after purchasing about 20 hectares of land, he discovered that men with chainsaws were cutting down trees to grow avocados on his property, which had been sold without his knowledge.

As he was unable to remove the invaders, he filed a complaint with the local Public Prosecutor’s Office in 2020, describing having been threatened by armed men. “I thought, as I felt my heart beating in my chest, ‘These guys are going to kill me, they’re going to make me disappear, or they’re going to hand me over to the criminals.'”

Still, despite the murder of two local property association leaders, Arévalo pursued his case to recover his land. “I didn’t stop because it was the only thing I was going to leave for my children.”

In Patuán, where the forest burned last year, residents tried to mobilize against deforestation, setting up a 24-hour checkpoint at the entrance to the city to prevent trucks carrying avocado seedlings from passing through. But its maintenance turned out to be laborious and the effort was abandoned after three months — and trucks full of avocado seedlings and bribe offers began to arrive.

“People come to me and say, ‘You know what, Mr. Commissioner, I’ll offer you 40,000, 50,000 pesos. Let us work,'” said José León Aguilar, a municipal administrator who grows avocados.

“Everything that is happening is our fault, because we are accomplices”, added Aguilar, denying, at the same time, involvement in illegal activities: “I have never been involved in wrong things”.

Even marked by environmental abuses, violence and corruption, the avocado trade is likely to continue to prosper. A study last year estimated that the area of ​​land in Michoacán used to grow the fruit could increase by more than 80% by 2050.

“We are aware that we cannot collapse the state’s economy. But we also know that if we don’t stop this, we will have nothing left,” said Alejandro Méndez, Michoacán’s environment secretary.