Avocado Being Blamed For Climate Change – No, It’s Growers’ Greed For Gold!
On Facebook, Nestor V Saludo shares what ANN says, “Top Chefs Declare War On Avocados In Their Restaurants[1]” (Author Not Named, 15 Nov 2021, DW Global Ideas):
Some of the world’s top chefs are moving away from using avocados in their restaurants –substituting popular dishes like guacamole… The reason behind the move is a concern about the large carbon footprint of this fruit and its unsustainable harvesting methods that lead to a loss of biodiversity, water scarcity and deforestation.
(globe-hand image[2] from Fair Observer)
Those 52 italicized words above are eye-opening if you knew climate change – I see that those chefs are literally barking at the wrong tree!
That paragraph is pregnant with meanings, plural. In fact, in those 52 words, we can already identify the culprits:
Unsustainable harvesting methods
I say those 3 words precisely point to wrong methods of harvesting and not a wrong fruit being harvested. Ergo, change methods, not fruit!
Loss of biodiversity
I say this is happening all over the world, and not only in avocado-country Mexico. Why? For profit out of food, our farmers practice monoculture – planting wide tracts of land to only 1 crop, such as avocado!
In Mexico, avocado farming in the state of Michoacán “has a land production size equivalent (to) 196,000 football fields; its regional economy is strongly dependent on a product with a market value of around $2.5 billion a year.”
So: Greed-dictated mono-cropping, not Mother Nature-dictated multi-cropping, is heating up the Earth. The fruit is gold, so the grower goes for more and more gold!
Water scarcity
I say: You plow large tracts of land and uniformly expose the surface soil without organic matter such as crop refuse on top of the field – how do you expect the soil water to behave except to evaporate automatically?! If instead, a natural mulch such as from a green manure crop is incorporated into the soil surface, there would alwaysbe water abundance.
Deforestation
To satisfy the hunger for profit, Mexican farmers open up forestlands. Manuel Ochoa Ayala says (24 Feb 2020, “Avocado: The 'Green Gold' Causing Environment Havoc[3],” World Economic Forum, weforum.org):
Disproportionately huge demand for the fruit is creating a climate change effect. Forest lands with diverse wildlife have been destroyed to produce avocado, and many more (are) intentionally burned to bypass a Mexican law allowing producers to change the land-use permit to commercial agricultureinstead of forest land, if it was lost to burning.
Mr Ayala says that sadly, avocado is being grown at the expense of forests – and wildlife. Also, farmers are intentionally burning forests so that they can change the land-use permit from “forest land” to “commercial agriculture”!
In short, it is the overwhelming profit motive of farmers that is the harbinger of climate change, not the crop that they grow!@517
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