https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/mexico-s-avocados-face-fallout-from-violence-deforestation/ar-AATWzPi?ocid=msedgntp
EXICO CITY (AP) — With clever Super Bowl ads, an irresistible fruit and apparently insatiable appetite from U.S. consumers, Mexico’s avocado producers have so far been able to separate avocados from the conflictive landscape that produces them — at least until a threat to a U.S. agricultural inspector essentially shut down their exports last week.
But as producers continue to suffer extortion from organized crime, and loggers continue to chop down pine forests to clear land for avocado orchards, another threat looms: Campaigns for greener competition and perhaps even a boycott.
Most advocates for more sustainable avocados stop short of calling for an outright boycott.
“They (avocados) are a very large portion of either their country or regional economy and, you know, banning them entirely would not be advantageous” for already struggling local farmers, said Gareth Elliott, a New Jersey restaurant manager who runs the Facebook page “Blood Avocados.” “But if there were more environmental studies and they were grown in a responsible manner, we could solve this together.”
So far, the association of Mexican avocado producers and packers has taken little action to solve the problems, nor has its U.S. promotional arm, Avocados from Mexico, even as growers in Mexico report having to pay thousands of dollars in protection payments to drug gangs for each acre of orchard.
Those who don't pay are threatened with having their families kidnapped, murdered and returned in pieces.
The producers' associations have bought multimillion-dollar Super Bowl commercials, but they have never bothered to come up with a serious certification program to assure consumers the avocado they buy has not involved protection money to drug cartels — the same cartels flooding the United States with deadly fentanyl pills counterfeited to look like Xanax, Adderall or Oxycodone.
But Elliott's reluctance to boycott might vanish if illegal logging and planting of avocados reaches into the core of the monarch butterfly reserves in the western state of Michoacan.
So far planters have only ni bbled around the buffer zones of the mountaintop pine forests where the butterflies spend the winter before heading back to the United States and Canada. At present, the mountaintops are too cold and too high for avocados, but with climate change that, as everything else, may change.
“The Monarch butterflies … they don’t have another option to hibernate elsewhere,” Gareth said. “I don’t think the Americans are going to want to say goodbye to monarch butterflies.
“I don’t think the Americans are going to want to say goodbye to monarch butterflies.