With avocado prices on the rise and American demand booming, Mexican farmers are cutting down trees to plant the fruit. “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,” says The Seattle Times. “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.”
The forests are also the wintering grounds for Monarch butterflies, a species already endangered due to pesticide use and the loss of its milkweed habitat in the U.S. Mario Tapia Vargas, a researcher at Mexico’s National Institute for Forestry, Farming and Fisheries Research, explained that avocado plants soak up nearly twice as much water as the native conifers, meaning that less water is available for other species. Greenpeace has additionally warned that the heavy use of chemicals on the crop and the need for ever-more wood to build avocado shipping boxes is taking a toll on the landscape.
But with avocado prices jumping from 86 cents apiece in January to $1.10 last month, farmers can earn $500,000 annually on a 12-acre plot. Money like that makes forest conservation a hard sell. “Farmers have seen that planting avocados is more profitable than planting corn, or other crops, or even the forest,” says Ignacio Vidales, a government researcher and avocado specialist. Still, Vidales, believes that deforestation rates have slowed recently after the Mexican government started seizing avocado plants and vehicles used to convert forests into orchards.