The Mexican Avocado Belt, a Case of Ecological Simplification: From Indigenous Woodlands to Commercial Orchards

• In Event: Forests, Communities, and States: Ecological and Political Challenges in Latin American Environmental History

Abstract

Michoacán’s Meseta Purhépecha’s ecological context that extraordinarily favors avocado cultivation sustained the emergence of a modern industry of avocado production in twentieth-century Mexico. The industry has specialized so significantly in the last thirty years with industrial and commercial infrastructure that Michoacán is the most competitive region in avocado production worldwide. So much is the case that the avocado belt in the Sierra Purhépecha feeds the two largest markets for avocado consumption per capita; Mexico and the United States. Mexicans do not even have to pay a restrictive price for the avocado they eat. Nonetheless, the price that urbanites pay for Michoacán’s avocados, mainly in Mexico and the United States, is not in the fruit’s price tag. While consuming avocado, global citizens have also consumed around sixty percent of Michoacán’s forests, home of the indigenous Purhépecha people. This presentation will describe how a process of ecology simplification, the transformation of biodiverse woodlands into a place of agricultural extraction, occurred in only five decades.

Author

• Viridiana Hernández Fernández, University of Iowa