Farmers in central Mexico are expanding their orchards to meet the high demand for avocados. American's love for the fruit and the rising prices of it are contributing to deforestation there, as forests are thinned to make room for avocado trees.
Avocado trees flourish at about the same altitude and climate as the pine and fir forests in the mountains of Michoacan, the state that produces most of Mexico’s avocados. 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.
Given that Michoacan’s forests contain much of the wintering grounds of the monarch butterfly, the deforestation is more than just an academic issue.
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.
Greenpeace Mexico says people are likely to suffer, too.
“Beyond the displacement of forests and the effects on water retention, the high use of agricultural chemicals and the large volumes of wood needed to pack and ship avocados are other factors that could have negative effects on the area’s environment and the well-being of its inhabitants,” Greenpeace said in a statement.
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.
But it is hard to argue farmers out of the economic logic of growing avocados.
Avocado prices jumped from around 86 cents apiece in January to around $1.10 in July, partly because of weak seasonal supply from Mexico. And the peso lost 16 percent of its value against the dollar over the past year, making exports cheaper for the U.S. customers. Mexican farmers can make much higher profits growing avocados than from most other crops.
It is the enormous U.S. appetite for avocados that has driven the expansion. Between 2001 and 2010, avocado production in Michoacan tripled, but exports rose 10 times, according to a report published in 2012 by Tapia Vargas’ institute.
The report suggested the expansion caused loss of forest land of about 1,700 acres (690 hectares) a year from 2000 through 2010.
