Avocado farms found in reserve for butterflies

MEXICO CITY — Mexican environmental inspectors said Wednesday that they have found three hectares of illegal avocado plantations in the monarch butterfly wintering grounds west of Mexico City.

It’s apparently the first time that a wave of avocado planting has had a significant, direct effect on the heart of the monarch area, a protected nature reserve.

Monarch butterflies migrate from the U.S. and Canada to pine and fir forests that thrive at about the same altitude as prime avocado-growing land.

Previously, deforestation linked to lucrative avocado planting had been seen in areas to the west and south of the reserve.

But on Wednesday, the environmental protection office said one man had been arrested for weapons possession at the site.

In April, police found that a 37-hectare swath of pine trees had been cut down in the nature reserve of Valle de Bravo, a bit east of the butterfly reserve, to plant avocado trees.

Without pine trees to provide thermal cover and roosting sites, the butterflies can freeze to death. While the monarch is not in danger of extinction, its 5,500-kilometre migration is endangered. No butterfly lives to make the round trip, and experts are still studying how they “remember” the route.

Previously, experts had estimated that Michoacan — the state where part of the reserve is located, and the biggest avocado-producing state in Mexico — loses 6,000 to 8,000 hectares of forest land annually to avocado plantations.

Ramon Paz, the spokesman for Mexico’s Association of Avocado Export Packers and Producers, said most Mexican avocados are not grown on land that was deforested to make way for plantations.

“We have been accused a lot of deforestation, but according to the information we have … between 85 and 90 per cent of the area planted with avocado trees was previously occupied for other agricultural uses,” Paz said.

Paz said his group, known as APEAM, is concerned about conserving forests. “We don’t want our product to be perceived as one that results from deforestation.”

Paz said the APEAM is working on getting its avocados certified as sustainable, and embarked four years ago on a project to plant about 250,000 pine seedlings annually.

Still, while prices have dropped from last year’s higher levels, avocados are much more lucrative than almost any other legal crop Mexican farmers can grow, and many landholders appear to be turning to avocados, legally or illegally.