Mexican fund to protect butterflies
Copyright 2001
The Ottawa Citizen
November 29, 2001
MEXICO CITY - Calling the monarch butterfly "the heritage of humanity," Mexican President Vicente Fox announced a program yesterday to protect the forests that serve as winter havens to hundreds of millions of butterflies that migrate from Canada and the United States.
Through the Monarch Trust, a $6.1 million U.S. fund created by the government and several private foundations, the government will pay residents to stop cutting trees and preserve and grow additional forests. "With this program, there will no longer be any justification for cutting down one single tree that serves as a refuge for the butterflies," Mr. Fox said in announcing the program -- one of several actions being commemorated as part of Mexico's National Conservation Week.
Each year, 100 million to 140 million of the orange-and-black monarch butterflies complete a journey of as many as 4,800 kilometres from the United States and Canada to five different sanctuaries nestled in the fir forests of central Mexico. The butterflies leave again in February and March to return to the north in a process scientists still do not yet fully understand.
Illegal logging has decimated 40 per cent of the forests the butterflies rely on over the past three decades.