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 always
be 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 agriculture
instead 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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