Avocados are entrenched in American cuisine. The rich, creamy fruit, swaddled in a coarse skin, is often smashed into guacamole, slathered on toast, or minced into salads.

The nation’s demand for Persea americana has surged by 600 percent since 1998. Most of the avocados consumed in the U.S., and many of those eaten elsewhere in the world, are a single variety grown in Michoacán, a state in west-central Mexico with an immensely profitable export industry worth at least $2 billion annually. But this “green gold rush” has come at a steep climatic cost, as vast tracts of protected land are razed for orchards. 

“We are losing the forest,” said Alejandro Méndez López, who has been the secretary of environment in Michoacán since 2022. Every year, up to 24,700 acres are illegally cleared for avocado production. “The main contribution of Michoacán for climate change is land-use change. So I think the whole world should be concerned.”

The state government hopes to mitigate that through a certification program that ensures packinghouses that ship the fruit to international markets are buying sustainably grown avocados. The effort, called Pro-Forest Avocado certification, launched last fall, and uses satellites to monitor orchards for signs of clear-cutting. Ultimately, the aim is to do away with deals between processors and producers that aren’t adhering to Mexico’s sweeping anti-deforestation law. 

That hasn’t gone over well with everyone in a business that has grown so profitable that it’s attracted interest from drug cartels and civilian militias.

Méndez López helped create this program and is its public face. He has spent the past month meeting with angry avocado growers throughout Michoacán, always in a car outfitted with bulletproof windows and accompanied by police. Despite his attempts to ease their concerns, he says many leave no less irate. Their problem isn’t so much with him, but what his presence represents: the government’s rollout of a program that is voluntary for packinghouses but leaves growers fearing they have little choice but to comply. 

“They were very angry. I was telling them that this certification is not compulsory, but many of them believe that this is a hidden way to tax them,” he said. Given the powerful role cartels play in the avocado business, his efforts to address the industry’s ecological and climatic impact has created no small risk to his safety. Some growers have started anonymously boycotting packinghouses that join, denouncing them as “traitors.” “I don’t want to be killed,” he said. “I’m a bit afraid, because right now we are touching their economic interests.” 

Climate activists and analysts say the program could replicate the market changes seen with other ethical labeling efforts like fair trade coffee and dolphin-free tuna. Locals are more skeptical, and worry that the industry’s history of corruption will undermine progress. And there’s always the question of it receiving the support needed to succeed. But Méndez López believes this is a legitimate solution to a grave issue. Even threats of violence won’t deter the work.

“We have very few resources,” he said. “They can come to my office and put a gun to my head, but they won’t be able to shut down a satellite.”  

Nearly a third of the avocados consumed worldwide — more than 2 million metric tons annually — are grown in Michoacán’s “Avocado Belt.” Fertile volcanic soils, elevated terrain, and warm, subtropical microclimates with ample rainfall make it the only region in the world with large-scale production year-round. 

Michoacán started moving toward the center of the global avocado trade in 1994 when the North American Free Trade Agreement opened the U.S. to imports from south of the border. By 2007, it was the only Mexican state authorized to send avocados throughout the U.S. This provided consumers with year-round access to the fruit, which further drove demand. Since 2019 alone, avocado exports to the United States have surged 48 percent. (Some 90 percent are the market-dominating Hass variety.)

That explosive growth has brought opportunity to economically disadvantaged areas. Juan Gabriel Pedraza, an Indigenous Purépecha farmer in the town of Sicuicho, told Grist that his people plant orchards even as they strive to protect the forests. He raises roughly 720 avocado trees alongside the pines. The crop “has brought life” to his community, which was once “extremely, extremely poor.” 

“We are like guardians of the forest, because if the forest disappears, then it’s going to affect everything else,” he said in Spanish. “We are always careful with keeping the forest healthy. It’s a duty of ours.”

Over the years, enormous avocado export profits have led to an escalation of violence that has surged alongside demand. Local cartels have bribed agricultural officials and police and extorted or kidnapped growers to maintain a stronghold in the lucrative business, while civilian militias have fought for control of their communities. Avocados are now Michoacán’s, and one of Mexico’s, biggest agricultural exports. This booming industry has triggered widespread violation of a federal law banning clear-cutting without government approval. About 95 percent of the deforestation in Mexico happens illegally. 

The problem has since expanded to neighboring Jalisco, the only other Mexican state authorized to ship avocados to the U.S. Some 40,000 to 70,000 acres across the two states were cleared between 1983 and 2023 to grow the fruit destined for American supermarkets, according to a Climate Rights International report. It also found that major U.S. supermarket chains, including Costco, Target, and Walmart, bought from packinghouses whose supply chains included orchards on recently deforested land. 

“More and more, these forests were disappearing and being transformed into avocado orchards,” said Antonio González-Rodríguez, a forest conservation scientist at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Michoacán’s capital city of Morelia. 

In 2022, his team estimated that another 100,000 hectares of orchards could be established in Michoacán by 2050 — an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan — of which more than two-thirds would lead to forest loss. That includes protected reserves home to endangered species like the eastern Monarch butterfly. Such a loss would represent “more than 10 percent of the remaining forest,” said González-Rodríguez. 

That comes with a staggering planetary cost. Chopping down forests eliminates vital carbon sinks and diminishes an ecosystem’s ability to store carbon. Meanwhile, warming threatens to reduce the amount of land highly suited to avocado cultivation by up to 41 percent worldwide within 25 years. 

Clear-cutting also contributes to water scarcity by increasing soil erosion and disrupting natural filtration processes, throwing off the water cycle. Over the course of one decade, deforestation can have the same impact on a community’s access to clean drinking water as a 9 percent decrease in rainfall. This is increasingly an issue as Mexico faces a severe supply crisis.

It doesn’t help that avocado trees need a lot of water and are only getting thirstier as the world warms. Water demand for the crop in Uruapan, Michoacán’s second largest city, rose nearly 24 percent from 2012 to 2017, with orchards drawing 120 percent of the amount allocated to agriculture, creating shortages. Last year, droughts prompted some growers to illegally siphon it from lakes or basins into unlicensed irrigation ponds. 

“The expansion of the avocado industry is creating a conflict over water,” González-Rodríguez said. “It’s going to become one of the more serious problems, socially and politically.” 

Voluntary certification programs that rely on public interest in fair and sustainable practices have reshaped consumer purchasing of everything from coffee to tuna. But assessing their impact can be difficult, said Stephanie Feldstein, population and sustainability director of the Center for Biological Diversity. 

One fundamental flaw many of these efforts share is a reliance on self-reporting, with little accountability and inadequate follow-up. Those that operate independently of the government often lack regulatory oversight, while others attempt to cover so many products, or so large a geographic area, that they rarely disrupt large industries or markets, she said. Crops associated with widespread deforestation, such as the Cavendish banana, often end up bogged down in too many certification schemes, with multiple retailers requesting several iterations of “sustainable” labels. At worst, these efforts provide little more than greenwashing, and typically at a high cost to producers.

Michoacán’s Pro-Forest program sidesteps many of those issues by focusing on a single product grown in a specific region and sold primarily to one international market. Its labeling scheme was created by a forest conservation nonprofit working in collaboration with the state government, researchers at local universities, and environmental organizations. It could soon end up boosted by Mexico’s federal government, which on January 30 announced the forthcoming launch of a national program to eliminate deforestation and water exploitation for agricultural exports. A week later, Michoacán Governor Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla issued anti-deforestation certificates to six packing plants and two orchards that together supply roughly 31 percent of the state’s avocados sold to the U.S. 

Orchards qualify for the scheme if they’ve had no deforestation since 2018, no forest fires since 2012, and do not operate on protected land. Government subsidies cover enrollment costs for packinghouses, while growers are charged about $40 for every 2.5 acres for certification. Growers must also pay for the conservation of a forest area to make up for the water consumption of their avocado cultivation. In a “plus” version of the program, companies commit to prioritizing buying from locally certified orchards. (No incentive for this tier exists just yet). 

So far, about 10 percent of the state’s packinghouses that send avocados to the U.S. have signed on. That means they’ve agreed to be informed which orchards are complying with the guidelines — and to cease working with those that do not. Packinghouses that continue buying from orchards in violation of the anti-deforestation guidelines lose the ability to certify their avocados as sustainably sourced.

But no one is promising to buy avocados only from orchards bearing the state’s official seal of approval, because there simply aren’t enough of them. As it stands, 937 out of the state’s 53,105 orchards have signed up, a number that changes almost daily, Heriberto Padilla Ibarra told Grist. Ibarra leads Guardian Forestal, the nonprofit overseeing the program’s remote sensing efforts.  

The scant participation may reflect the fact that local producers must pay for certification that packinghouses receive for free. It could also be because growers like Icpac Escalera have little faith in government initiatives. Escalera runs his family’s organic avocado orchard in the town of Acuitzio del Canje. Although he considers the labeling a valiant effort, he says the 2018 date barring deforestation “is not enough.” He also doubts the state has sufficient resources to enforce it, and is worried that it will further disenfranchise smaller producers “without political clout.” 

“The political situation hasn’t really helped anything in terms of making sure that deforestation is being properly handled,” Escalera said in Spanish. “Many politicians have avocado fields. It’s a well-known secret. There are not enough incentives for the smaller producers to maintain the forest, and because of that, the forests are disappearing.” 

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All the while, global demand for avocados continues to soar. Production in other top exporters like Colombia, Peru, and the Dominican Republic is booming, and breeders are developing new varieties. Even as avocados could overtake pineapples and mangos to become the world’s most traded tropical fruit as early as this year, regulators are stepping in to minimize their environmental and climatic impacts.

The European Union is set to begin implementing “deforestation-free” product regulations in December. The United States took strides in that direction one year ago when several senators urged the Biden administration to address the role the country takes in driving the crisis as a primary market for avocados. Ken Salazar, the former U.S. ambassador to Mexico, announced that avocados grown in illegally cleared orchards should be blocked from the market, before the administration released a policy framework on how to begin doing so for all agricultural imports in December.

President Donald Trump has yet to address the topic, but given his administration’s hostility toward climate action, he isn’t likely to do much about the issue for that reason. But the impending threat of tariffs on Mexico imply the administration may be interested in doing something about it, if for no reason than to limit overall imports from the country, said James Sayre, an agricultural economist at the University of California, Davis. “In a way, the Trump administration could end up acting on the deforestation issue,” he said. 

Despite the controversial reputation of product labeling, Méndez López remains optimistic about Michoacán’s certification initiative. He hopes to see Mexico and its biggest avocado market federally mandate the need for such schemes. “It would be wonderful if the U.S. had a compulsory [requirement] for the imports of avocado to be deforestation-free. That would be perfect. But, we didn’t get so far [with the Biden administration]. And I don’t know if this new administration will do that,” he said. 

For Julio Santoyo Guerrero, an environmental activist in the Michoacán municipality of Madero, the program, while “barely a lifeline” is at least a measure that warns people of the dire ethical and environmental costs linked to every avocado they consume. 

“Our biggest cancer is corruption … I believe that the cause that originated the expansion of avocados, the market demand, will be the same thing that can stop it,” said Guerrero in Spanish. “If the market continues to function without regulation, our forests will continue to be destroyed.”