Over-harvesting of the San Ignacio Palm Orchards

Text and Photos by Javier Villavicencio

SAN IGNACIO, B.C.S.

In the middle of the Vizcaíno Desert is a beautiful oasis, the town of San Ignacio, which boasts an immense palm forest and a large lagoon formed by an underground spring. In this heavenly setting a wide variety of flora and fauna can be found.

But of late, a serious problem has developed.  A large number of palm trees are being removed and shipped to other cities where they are then planted as ornamental street trees.

This problem was allowed to develop because the San Ignacio ejido did not have its legal papers in order.  As a result, people from outside of San Ignacio were able to take advantage of this oversight and began to remove palms without any local oversight.

For each tree, the company would pay the owners of the palm orchards 300 pesos and the workers who cut them down 200 pesos (about 23 dollars and 15 dollars respectively).  The trees would then be removed with a crane and transported by semi-trailer.

Now that the Ejido’s legal status has been corrected and all of its documentation is in order, the problem has resolved itself. But the extraction of the palms has left a noticeable mark, most notably seen in the reduced quantity of dates produced as compared to past years.

One of the solutions that has been tried is the creation of nurseries to raise palm seedlings for later transplant into the orchards.  The goal is to return to the same number of trees present before the plunder occurred. This project began because an enthusiastic group of people, together with the ejidatarios of San Ignacio, started to plant palm

trees in a place known as La Concha on a piece of land that the ejidatarios gave to the group for their project. The group is under the leadership of Dolores Quiroz Obregón and most of the members of this energetic group of neighbors are women.