Can satellite imagery fight illegal logging in Mexico?

Cheran, Mexico – Shortly after dawn, several women arrive at a tree nursery on the outskirts of Cheran, an indigenous Purepecha town in the Mexican state of Michoacan.

For years they have ensured that thousands of trees were used to reforest areas devastated by illegal logging. Between 2006 and 2012, researchers estimate that about 70 percent of Cheran’s forests were destroyed by organized criminals as locals protested to denounce police inaction.

During those years, residents grew accustomed to the sight of dozens of trucks passing through their town, loaded with wood stolen from local forests. Violent confrontations ensued, with more than a dozen members of the community reportedly killed or disappeared.

“The devastation was massive,” Yunuen Torres, who lives in the city, told Al Jazeera. People were forced to sell their land to the criminals, and if they refused, they sometimes disappeared, Torres added.

Today, the state of Michoacan is about to roll out a new surveillance system designed to help fight this type of crime.

On June 5, World Environment Day, the state government will begin using a satellite analytics tool that can detect changes in forest cover caused by logging, fires or new crops. The system automatically generates alerts when such changes are detected.

“We had great impunity,” Alejandro Mendez, Michoacan’s environment minister, told Al Jazeera. “What we need is to regain control as a government, because the collective interest is to take care of forests.”

Report without fear

Heriberto Padilla, the chief executive officer of Agriicola, the Mexican start-up that designed the new monitoring system, said it will help hold Michoacan accountable. Reporting environmental crimes in the state can be a deadly business, he told Al Jazeera.

“That is exactly what the system will do: report without fear. By filing complaints, authorities are forced to solve the cases within a certain time,” he said. “If they don’t do anything, that’s proof there’s a corruption problem.”

Agriicola has designed a website where information about the system and alerts generated will be publicly available, while also being forwarded to government agencies, Padilla said. The state has committed to pursuing “all legal processes” to follow up on these reports and ensure that those responsible for deforestation are held accountable, he added.

In Cheran, where tensions turned into a popular uprising in 2011, the illegal loggers were finally driven out. The struggles of the Purepecha people also laid the groundwork for an unprecedented political project that granted self-government to the indigenous community, with forest conservation remaining a core value to this day.

But the threat of illegal logging still looms, and some are skeptical about how the new satellite system will work in practice.

“It is a government tool, but in fact many other tools are already in use,” one community member told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity. “We’re working on community mapping and we’re using drones.”

Deforestation for the development of illegal avocado plantations has become a widespread problem throughout Michoacan. In some cases, these plantations have ties to government officials, said the community member, questioning whether the Agriicola system would actually strengthen enforcement efforts: “How are they going to [the plantations] if high-ranking officials are involved?”

Avocado cultivation

More than 260,000 hectares (642,000 acres)—nearly twice the size of Mexico City—have been deforested in Michoacan between 2001 and 2018, according to the Mexican government. More than a fifth of this area was converted to farmland, part of which was used for growing avocados.

Converting forested land to avocado plantations has been effectively banned in Michoacan since the late 1980s. This requires a land-use change permit, which has not been issued for this purpose for more than 30 years, Mendez said.

In Michoacan, known as the “avocado capital of the world,” about 30 percent of the current avocado crop is illegal, Mendez said. The United States imported more than 1 million tons of avocados from Mexico last year, generating more than $3 billion in sales, according to official data.

Forests continue to be illegally destroyed to grow avocados and other export crops that “have great economic appeal” but put enormous pressure on local forests and jungles, Mendez said. Avocados are also a particularly thirsty crop, sending parts of the state into a “desertification spiral” that will be exacerbated by climate change.

In the meantime, ahead of next month’s formal launch, Agriicola has been testing its monitoring system and has already identified thousands of potential violations in Michoacan, Padilla said.

Still, Irene Alvarez, a researcher with the nonprofit Noria Research group, says that not identification, but rather follow-up, will be a major challenge.

“The problem is not to see how the landscape changes, but to be able to identify whose plantation it belongs to and follow it up legally,” she told Al Jazeera. While the satellite system will be a useful evidence-gathering tool, “it will not solve the underlying problem, which is that we need sufficient budget [for combatting environmental crimes] and judicial enforcement”.

This article was supported by GRID-Arendal’s Investigative Environmental Journalism Grants program.