The price of a perfect avocado

Padilla, general director of Guardian Forestal, the non-profit that developed the new monitoring system Uruapan in Michoacan, saw firsthand how growers had razed the pine-oak forests around his mother’s hometown in Michoacan. — Cesar Rodriguez/The New York Times

WHEN word of a new plan to help save forests reached Juan Gabriel Pedraza, an indigenous leader in Mexico’s avocado heartlands, he feared the worst.

“They’re going to screw us over,” he remembered thinking.