Americans’ love for avocados and rising prices for the highly exportable fruit are fueling the deforestation of central Mexico’s pine forests as farmers rapidly expand their orchards to feed demand.
Avocado trees flourish at about the same altitude and climate as the pine and fir forests in the mountains of Michoacan State, where most of Mexico’s avocados are produced. That has led farmers to wage a cat-and-mouse campaign to avoid authorities, thinning out the forests, planting young avocado trees under the forest canopy, and then gradually cutting back the forest as the trees grow to give them more sunlight.
“Even where they aren’t visibly cutting down forest, there are avocados growing underneath [the pine boughs], and sooner or later they’ll cut down the pines completely,” said Mario Tapia Vargas, a researcher at Mexico’s National Institute for Forestry, Farming and Fisheries Research.
Photo: AP
Given that Michoacan’s forests contain much of the wintering grounds of the monarch butterfly, the deforestation is more than just an academic issue. Authorities have already detected small avocado plots in the monarchs’ reserve where farmers have cut down pine forest.
Worse, Tapia Vargas said, a mature avocado orchard uses almost twice as much water as fairly dense forest, meaning less water reaches Michoacan’s legendary crystalline mountain streams on which the forests and animals depend.
The two-lane rural roads that cut through the mountains are choked with lines of heavy trucks carrying avocados out and pickers in to the orchards.
However, it is hard to argue farmers out of the economic logic of growing avocados.
Avocado prices jumped from about US$0.86 each in January to about US$1.10 last month, partly because of weak seasonal supply from Mexico. In addition, the peso has lost 16 percent of its value against the US dollar over the past year, making exports cheaper for US customers. Mexican farmers can make much higher profits growing avocados than from most other crops.
It is the enormous US appetite for avocados that has driven the expansion. From 2001 to 2010, avocado production in Michoacan tripled, but exports rose 10 times, according to a report published in 2012 by the forestry institute.
The report suggested the expansion caused loss of forest land of about 690 hectares per year from 2000 through 2010.
Authorities have begun to fight back.
On July 31, federal police in Morelia, the Michoacan state capital, detained 13 people and seized two avocado plants and two vehicles that were being used to turn a recently deforested plot into an orchard.
Police said 260 pine trees and 87 firs had been cut down on a 4.7 hectare plot to make room for 1,320 avocado saplings. While the trees take seven years to reach maturity, if each bore 100 avocados a year — a fairly low yield — those farmers could make as much as US$500,000 annually from the plot, a fortune for area farmers.
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