Americans Love Avocados. It’s Killing Mexico’s Forests.

By Simon Romero and Emiliano Rodríguez Mega Photographs by César Rodríguez Reporting from Patuán and other sites around the state of Michoacán where deforestation is advancing. | Nov. 28, 2023 The New York Times

Trees that were burned during a forest fire and will likely have to be cut down.

Illegal deforestation for avocado crops points to a blood-soaked trade with the United States involving threats, abductions and killings.

First the trucks arrived, carrying armed men toward the mist-shrouded mountaintop. Then the flames appeared, sweeping across a forest of towering pines and oaks.

After the fire laid waste to the forest last year, the trucks returned. This time, they carried the avocado plants taking root in the orchards scattered across the once tree-covered summit where townspeople used to forage for mushrooms.

“We never witnessed a blaze on this scale before,” said Maricela Baca Yépez, 46, a municipal official and lifelong resident of Patuán, a town nestled in the volcanic plateaus where Mexico’s Purépecha people have lived for centuries.

By The New York Times

In western Mexico forests are being razed at a breakneck pace and while deforestation in places like the Amazon rainforest or Borneo is driven by cattle ranching, gold mining and palm oil farms, in this hot spot, it is fueled by the voracious appetite in the United States for avocados.

A combination of interests, including criminal gangs, landowners, corrupt local officials and community leaders, are involved in clearing forests for avocado orchards, in some cases illegally seizing privately owned land. Virtually all the deforestation for avocados in the last two decades may have violated Mexican law, which prohibits “land-use change” without government authorization.

Since the United States started importing avocados from Mexico less than 40 years ago, consumption has skyrocketed, bolstered by marketing campaigns promoting the fruit as a heart-healthy food and year-round demand for dishes like avocado toast and California rolls. Americans eat three times as many avocados as they did two decades ago.

South of the border, satisfying the demand has come at a high cost, human rights and environmental activists say: the loss of forests, the depletion of aquifers to provide water for thirsty avocado trees and a spike in violence fueled by criminal gangs muscling in on the profitable business.

A laborer cutting avocados in the state of Michoacán last month. Demand for avocados grown in Mexico has led to the destruction of forests, the depletion of aquifers and a spike in violence fueled by drug cartels.

And while the United States and Mexico both signed a 2021 United Nations agreement to “halt and reverse” deforestation by 2030, the $2.7 billion annual avocado trade between the two countries casts doubts over those climate pledges.

Mexican environmental officials have called on the United States to stop avocados grown on deforested lands from entering the American market, yet U.S. officials have taken no action, according to documents obtained by Climate Rights International, a nonprofit focused on how human rights violations contribute to climate change.

In a new report, the group identified dozens of examples of how orchards on deforested lands supply avocados to American food distributors, which in turn sell them to major American supermarket chains.

Fresh Del Monte, one of the largest American avocado distributors, said the industry supported reforestation projects in Mexico. But, in a statement, the company also said that “Fresh Del Monte does not own farms in Mexico,” and relied on “industry collaboration” to ensure growers abided by local laws.

In western Mexico, interviews by The Times with farmers, government officials and Indigenous leaders showed how local people fighting deforestation and water theft have become targets of intimidation, abductions and shootings.

Like deforestation elsewhere, the leveling of Mexico’s pine-oak and oyamel fir forests reduces carbon storage and releases climate-warming gases. But clear-cutting for avocados, which require vast amounts of water, has ignited another crisis by draining aquifers that are a lifeline for many farmers.

One mature avocado tree uses about as much water as 14 mature pine trees, said Jeff Miller, the author of a global history of the avocado.

“You’re putting in deciduous forests of a very water hungry tree and tearing out conifer forests of not so very water hungry trees,” Mr. Miller said. “It’s just wrecking the environment.” In parts of Mexico already on edge over turf wars among drug cartels, forest loss is fueling new conflicts and raising concerns that Mexican authorities are largely allowing illegal timber harvesters and avocado growers to act with impunity.

As soon as avocado orchards pop up in deforested areas, illegal wells appear nearby with water transported to orchards through a labyrinthine system of plastic pipes that often pilfer the water supplies of farmers growing traditional crops like tomatoes or corn.

Avocados have been consumed for thousands of years in the region, whose temperate hillsides of porous volcanic soil offer optimal growing conditions. But producing the fruit on an industrial scale for export dates only to the 1990s, when Mexico pressured the United States to end its ban on avocado imports, after opening its own market to American corn.

Avocados being processed in a packing house in Uruapan. Avocado consumption in the United States has soared since Mexico began exporting them to the American market.

Michoacán is known as the ancestral cradle of the avocado in Mexico.

Mexico now accounts for nearly 90 percent of all avocado shipments to the United States. In Michoacán, the avocado industry employs more than 300,000 workers in the state of 4.8 million, according to government figures. (Visit The New York Times for the original article.)