Mexico has become the star of the United Nations’ ambitious reforestation campaign, accounting last year for a fourth of the one billion trees planted worldwide. The country’s efforts include another 250 million trees planted so far this year, and have earned President Felipe Calderón a Global Leadership Award from the UN’s Environment Program in June. The UN agency, which has raised this year’s worldwide goal to seven billion trees, cited Mexico’s “proven, high-impact actions” on behalf of its forests. But environmentalists here paint a starkly different picture of the government reforestation campaign, called Proárbol. In a recent press release entitled “the Proárbol lie,” Greenpeace accused the federal government of squandering more than half of its annual 4-billion-peso (US$360 million at 2007... [Log in to read more]