Deforestation in Mexico, “perfect recipe for disaster”

2023-07-21 05:52:47

Poverty, monocultures, the pig industry, megaprojects and the “brutal budget cuts” of the State deforest Mexico. How to face them?

In 20 years, Mexico has lost 736,000 hectares of primary forests, enough to cover almost five times its capital, Mexico City, confirm data from the Global Forest Watch (GFW) satellite monitoring platform. And this is just over 15 percent of the total forest cover lost, some 4.7 million hectares.

The country is still not on the list of the ten that have lost the most primary forests in the world, where Brazil leads, followed by other Latin American neighbors such as Bolivia (3), Peru (5) and Colombia (6). But the advance of deforestation in Mexico has significant causes and consequences inside and outside its borders.

With more than 70 percent of its territory (138.7 million hectares) covered by some type of forest vegetation, according to data from the National Forestry Commission (Conafor), Mexico is one of the 12 “megadiverse” countries that are home to 70 percent of the planet’s flora and fauna.

Poverty, monocultures and the pig industry

“Of the entire country, the most affected area is the Yucatan peninsula,” in the south, with very thin and porous karstic soil, Yuri Peña Ramírez, a researcher at the Colegio de la Frontera Sur (ECOSUR) in Campeche, told DW. , one of the most deforested states in Mexico, along with Chiapas, Quintana Roo, Yucatan and Veracruz.

Among the fundamental causes, the expert highlights poverty, which unleashes “ant processes” of degradation, forcing people without resources to illegally cut down to obtain wood or firewood, in the absence of possibilities to produce and trade products with high added value, such as Honey. “Germany imports a lot of honey from Campeche,” he illustrates. However, he does it through “big hoarders in the Yucatán,” he laments.

Added to this is monoculture agriculture, with agrochemicals and “slash, slash and burn” techniques to change land use, practiced -especially by peasants of Mennonite origin, he says- without the rest periods customary for the Mayan traditional farmers. As well as the cycles of involuntary forest fires reinforced by climate change, Peña lists.

However, 97 percent of Mexican forest fires are caused by human activity, especially agricultural activity, and only 3 percent by drought or electrical storms, says Viridiana Lázaro, a food and agriculture campaigner for Greenpeace Mexico. Meanwhile, she indicates, 70 percent of the wood sold in the country comes from illegal logging.

Another key is in pig farming, “highly encouraged by the local government of Yucatan,” highlights the Greenpeace expert. “50 percent of the national territory is used to produce livestock feed,” and this includes deforestation practices for the illegal planting of transgenic soybeans and corn, she adds.

A “degenerative cycle”

As if that were not enough, there are also state megaprojects such as the Mayan Train, a banner of the current Government. “The problem is not the layout of the train, with 50 meters on each side of the track, but rather, since the soil is so thin, there is not enough material to make the embankment,” explains Peña, a specialist in Biotechnology and Ecology at Forestales Tropicales. . So this material is extracted from quarries with which “they are breaking up patches of jungle that were intact” in core areas of the Quintana Roo and Campeche reserves, he denounced.

“They are dividing an important biological corridor that connects Mexico with Central America” ​​and affects large fauna in danger of extinction such as jaguars, adds the Greenpeace expert.

“By losing forests, we lose water flows and, with them, the regulatory capacity of the planet to maintain the temperature at a more or less constant level,” warns the ECOSUR researcher, in a country that is already experiencing impressive heat waves and extreme torrential rains. And he describes a “degenerative cycle”, in which, “by losing moisture, we have more extreme climates, which affect the ability of plants to grow and develop.”

“Brutal budget cuts”

Added to all this are the “brutal budget cuts” that the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has imposed on federal agencies such as Conafor and the National Commission for National Protected Areas (Conanp), as well as research institutions related to environmental surveillance, lists Peña.

Against the current, nearly 200 NGOs, including European and American ones, are trying to promote the production and marketing of certified wood and organic products with high added value, so that local producers abandon predatory activities. But its results are still limited.

“Sembrando Vida”, with the opposite effect

Although the problem stems from previous governments, the current one “has backtracked,” says the ECOSUR forestry expert. So much so that his reforestation project, “Sembrando Vida”, became, in practice, “a program of perks and social clientelism” with the opposite effect: “the perfect recipe for disaster,” he says, since producers cut trees indiscriminately to request the subsidies offered by the Government.

“Natural preserved forest masses are being deforested to plant fruit trees,” criticizes Viridiana Lázaro. According to data from the World Resources Institute (WRI) “Sembrando Vida” has caused a loss of forest cover of more than 70 thousand hectares.

With “Sembrando Vida”, the Mexican government seeks to promote reforestation with subsidies for farmers. But environmentalists report the opposite effect. Image: Aitor Sáez/DW

Hope: education, science and youth

Faced with this bleak panorama, the Greenpeace Mexico activist insists on demanding “structural change” from the government: “clear policies” against deforestation, which include the proper enforcement of existing laws and, above all, “the participation of communities , with voice and vote, in management plans for protected natural areas”, which provide effective protection.

“The greatest hope is in young people, in training young people in science and technology careers,” insists the ECOSUR researcher, who coordinates a Youth Science Workshop in Campeche, and seeks international alternatives to finance it, despite state cuts. His hope: that Mexico manages to “develop the scientific muscle necessary to generate, locally, information that allows more intelligent solutions to be proposed.”

(cp)