English version Martha Pskowski
Agroindustry, social and environmental conflicts and mega-projects are growing in the shade of oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) plantations across Mexico. Going back 74 years, right-wing, left-wing and centrist administrations have spent billions of pesos in public funds to promote monoculture oil palm production among small-scale farmers and to finance large-scale agroindustry. It is in these same areas that infrastructure projects like the Mayan Train, intermodal terminals, and the Interoceanic Train are being built and operated by the Marines and Army.
It’s an attractive wager: the estimated value of the oil palm market in Mexico is $2.3 billion annually1. “The government convinced small and large producers, campesinos, to plant oil palm. They provided the nurseries and created the conditions,” said Gustavo Castro of the Red Mesoamericano Contra la Palma de Aceite (The Mesoamerican Network Against Palm Oil). Of course, all this was done with public funds.
Bermunda Bautista, a 70-year-old campesina from Campeche, has spent the last 24 years of her life growing oil palm. She started out only knowing that oil is extracted from the plant. Like most of the people who plant oil palm and consume its derivatives, she did not know that in Mexico 92 percent of palm oil is used by the food industry in snacks, cookies, chocolates, dairy products, including baby formula, and practically any other product that contains vegetable oil. Another seven percent2 is used for biofuels and one percent is used by the chemical industry for soaps, shampoos and detergents.
“Before you began planting it, had you ever seen an oil palm plant or even the fruits?” I asked her.
“No, I wasn’t familiar with it. It went like this, they showed us some videos, I don’t know if they were from Poza Rica or Costa Rica,” she said.
Next she was given plants and half the money it would take to sow them. But Bermunda is quick to say that none of this was “given away for free” because she had to provide the land and the labor, in addition to the initial investment to rent machinery to prepare the soil for planting.
“Do you think without all this governmental assistance, without all of these public policies, oil palm cultivation would be so profitable?” asks Gustavo Castro.
The short answer is no, at least for the producers who are currently growing oil palm.
Thanks to taxpayer money, turned into state spending, and the work of the rural population, since 2010 oil palm cultivation in Mexico has increased on average 6,174 hectares every year, the equivalent of the entire area in sunflower cultivation in Mexico. By 2023, 129,838.85 hectares were dedicated to oil palm. Mexico still lags behind countries like Honduras and Guatemala, but is now the sixth largest producer in the continent.
Also known as African palm, oil palm is now the twenty-fourth most widely cultivated out of 290 crops in Mexico. However in economic value oil palm comes in thirty-third. For comparison, there are only 21,000 hectares planted with papaya in Mexico but papaya has double the economic value of oil palm. Even blueberries, which are cultivated on a mere 6,000 hectares, generated billions more in Mexican pesos than oil palm ($18.7 million USD).
This shows that even though oil palm can generate multi-million dollar profits for business owners, those who grow the raw material could earn more growing other crops. The oil palm grown in Mexico is consumed domestically3. But Mexico still imports far more palm oil than any other country in Latin America, importing 44 percent more than Brazil, the second biggest importer.
José Luis Pérez Morett, the president of Grupo Oleomex, the biggest palm oil conglomerate in Mexico, stated the dynamic plainly. “We are formidable suppliers for the principal food companies in the country, like Bimbo, Sabritas, Nestlé, Unilever, Procter, Colgate, and many more, all companies that use a large percentage of palm oil in their products,” he said.
Pérez Morett made the comment in 2012 during the opening of one of his company’s four oil palm extraction plants. The sitting president Felipe Calderón – a conservative from the Partido de Acción Nacional4 – and the sitting governor of Tabasco, Andrés Granier Melo – a centrist from the Partido Revolucionario Institucional – both spoke at the event. In their speeches they both praised the “riches” of oil palm and committed to increasing its production.
Nine years later in 2021, subsequent Tabasco governor Adán Augusto López Hernández assured the audience at the inauguration of the Centro de Investigación e Innovación para la Sustentabilidad de la Palma de Aceite (CIISPALMA) that he would turn the state into the “palm capital of Latin America”. He is now a powerful senator for Morena, which currently governs Mexico as a self-defined leftist party. His rhetoric contradicted that of his close friend, Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-24), who vowed to end subsidies to palm companies and to separate political power from economic power.
The center cost 54 million Mexican pesos to build, of which 41,694,751.60 pesos ($2 million USD)5 were federal funds from the Fondo Mixto del Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología6 . The state government and the Mexican Oil Palm Federation (FemexPalma) assumed the rest of the cost. FemexPalma, which brings together owners of oil palm businesses, operates the center. I sought access to the center three times for interviews to understand its work and how it benefits the public. I was denied on three occasions.
A Silent Invasion
Despite statistics and extensive documentation of its negative impacts, in Mexico opposition to oil palm cultivation remains mostly testimonial. “Because it’s not a mine, or a dam, or an emblematic case of defending the environment, control of territory goes along with the extension of oil palm plantations,” explains Claudia Ramos Guillén, a member of the Reentramados para la Vida Defendiendo Territorio, a women’s collective that works to strengthen the capacity of rank-and-file social movements and organizations in Chiapas, where 46 percent of Mexico’s palm plantations are located.
The expansion of oil palm is not silent. Instead, it has fallen on deaf ears. Businesspeople, politicians, diplomats and international organizations have promoted and publicized the Mexican oil palm industry. There are official documents, statistics, videos, reports, speeches and project plans. The industry has received millions in funds from the Mexican government and international development organizations. An intense lobbying effort from multiple universities, media outlets and trade organizations backs the palm industry. Nonetheless, it appears that few people are addressing the social, environmental and territorial problems that come along with it.
The Secretariat of Agriculture, Livestock, Rural Development, Fisheries and Nutrition (SAGARPA) identified approximately nine million hectares with potential for oil palm cultivation in its National Agricultural Plan 2017 to 2030. But a 2019 cartographic study by Cristina de la Vega-Leinert and Daniel Sandoval7 , using the same strategic regions as defined by SAGARPA and the INIFAP8 methodology, calculated a viable area of some 14.2 million hectares. This represents a larger land surface than the size of at least 60 countries.
Oil palm originated in West and Central Africa, particularly in countries including Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, the Ivory Coast and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It wasn’t until the 20th century during colonial and capitalist expansion that large-scale cultivation of oil palm reached Indonesia and Malaysia, where 80 percent of commercial plantations are now located.
In Mexico, oil palm has primarily been cultivated along the Chiapas coast, but now the areas of most rapid expansion are in a corridor running between the Tuxtla region of Veracruz and the Palenque region of Chiapas, crossing through Tabasco and reaching the state of Campeche9 , about 50 kilometers from the border with Guatemala. This border region is where the palm belt of Central America begins, which extends all the way to the Colón department of Honduras.
On the Mexican side this corridor overlaps with two of the most emblematic projects of former president López Obrador: the Mayan Train and the Interoceanic Train. The former connects Palenque with Puerto Progreso in Yucatán. The FA branch of the Interoceanic Train starts in Palenque and continues to the port of Coatzacoalcos in the heart of the Gulf of Mexico, where a palm oil refinery is located.
“And what is this train going to transport?” Sara López González of the Civil Resistance of Candelaria and the Regional Indigenous Council of Xpujil asks rhetorically.
“That’s why we have all these hog farms in Yucatán, GMO soy, sorghum, all of the oil from the Gulf [of Mexico], all the gasoline. This also includes African palm which is one of the biggest monoculture crops here in Campeche, Chiapas and Tabasco,” the activist says.
López Obrador at first assured that the train would be for passengers and would catalyze economic development in the region. But documents related to the project make clear that 70 percent of the revenue from the train would come from transporting cargo: 33 percent from food and perishables, 26 percent from fuel and 11 percent from the construction industry.
During the train’s construction, the director of the National Tourism Development Fund, Rogelio Jiménez Pons, acknowledged that the project would, “catalyze nodes of development in the five states that it will pass through, which will include agroindustry business parks for meat, fruits, forestry, organic foods and oil palm.”
President Claudia Sheinbaum, who calls her administration the “second floor of the fourth transformation” started by her predecessor, spoke about the trains in one of her daily press conferences in December 2024 . She announced developments along the Interoceanic Corridor and progress the Marines10 had made on improving commercial ports including Coatzacoalcos and Progreso, which that year increased by 31 percent its cargo of palm oil and palm stearin .
“In Palenque, the Mayan Train will be a cargo terminal, an intermodal cargo terminal, and the Trans-Isthmus will connect with this terminal so there isn’t double infrastructure. We are going to work together with the Mayan Train to use this terminal and from there we will deliver cargo to the Mayan Train and they will carry it,” explained the Marine secretary and vice admiral Raymundo Pedro Morales Ángeles.
Juanita from the collective Tsiji’bä Bij, a Maya organization that opposed the train’s construction and works with campesinos to inform them about negative impacts of planting African palm, takes a different stance from the state’s postures.
“This train is to benefit the dominant capitalist system, which is only interested in accumulating more wealth without considering the impacts to Mother Earth,” she said. “It was built by buying the consciences of our ejido authorities through faked consultations.”
Conflict-Free
In Candelaria, the fifth stop on the Mayan Train from Palenque, the midday heat rises above 40 degrees celsius. With the humidity, it becomes unbearable and creates a suffocating feeling. Two navigable rivers in the middle of this rainforest region, the Candelaria and the Caribe, flow into the Laguna de Términos, in addition to ten smaller rivers, lakes and wetlands. The environment is tropical in all senses of the word. That makes Candelaria a favorite place to swim among local tourists and the ideal place to grow oil palm, which needs vast quantities of water.
Between 2003 and 2022 the rainforest in Candelaria was deforested at a rate of 10.68 hectares a day, according to the National Forestry Commission. Two of the principal causes were the result of public policies: the monoculture of oil palm and the construction of the Mayan Train. According to Global Forest Watch, between 2001 and 2023, Campeche was the state with the largest loss of forest cover, even though 40 percent of the state is protected as conservation areas.
The Agriculture, Food and Fishing Information Service reported that in 1998 the first 2,893 hectares of African palm were planted in Campeche. As of 2012, the plantations still covered less than 4,000 hectares. But by 2014, the area planted with African palm rose to 13,805 hectares. According to the last annual report of activities by Governor Fernando Ortega (2009-2015), that year at least 150.94 million pesos ($8 million USD) were allocated for the different stages of the industry, from nurseries to industrial plants.
Five years later the state became Mexico’s second largest producer of oil palm. This rapid acceleration came under the administration of Governor Alejandro “Alito” Moreno Cárdenas (2015-2019), national president of the PRI and senator, who named the agro-businessman Armando Constantino Toledo Jamit as secretary of rural development. Toledo Jamit is the owner, among other businesses, of the central food market of Campeche, Frutas Tropicales de Campeche (Frutoka) and of Grupo Toka. The latter is a palm company founded in 2011, which between 2015 and 2016 brought together several of his companies and others owned by family members to develop nurseries and industrialize oil palm.
While Toledo Jamit was determining the agricultural policies of Campeche, his companies and those owned by his family were receiving government resources. In 2016, journalist Ronny Aguilar confronted Toledo Jamit, who responded, “It’s right and what’s the problem? Being in the palm industry, I believe in the project and that’s why we’re supporting it.”
His argument was that because the funds were from the federal and local government there was no conflict of interest as a state official in accepting them. That same year Governor Alejandro Moreno announced the Strategic African Palm Cultivation Program.
“The revolving door is a characteristic of neoliberalism everywhere, in which the functions of the state are captured by those with economic power,” said Victor Suárez Palma, currently Mexico’s agrarian prosecutor. He ascribes to the slogan of “separating economic and political power” and warns that “government bureaucracy has been constructed over decades by administrations linked to economic power and the problem continues at high and mid-level agencies.”
This continued problem is evident as, despite complaints within the Morena party, the current Campeche governor, Layda Sansores — daughter of former governor Carlos Sansores (1967-73) — named Toledo Jamit as her chief of staff and in 2023 he became Home Secretary. He resigned from this role in January 2025 after he was caught on video accepting rolls of bills from a supposed member of the previous administration.
Big Businessmen
In Mexico, 50.8 percent of the land is considered communal property, pertaining to ejidos and communities, 42.8 percent is private property and the rest is split between federal lands, agrarian colonies and ranches. Ejidos are areas designated for communal land use under the Mexican Constitution. The proportion of communal property has declined since 1992 when the first neoliberal government modified the Constitution to allow members of ejidos to convert their parcels into private property, which opened up ejidos to developers, the agricultural industry and land grabbers.
For years it was assumed that the land tenure of oil palm cultivation followed a similar pattern, in other words that most oil palm was planted on communal lands. It appears that in the beginning that was the case. But a 2024 study by Antonio Castellanos Navarrette found that 63 percent of the land oil palm is cultivated on is private property11. According to the study this can include family farmers, established ranchers, small landowners, and Mexican or transnational private companies.
One of the biggest players in this new structure is Agroforestal Uumbal, which according to the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) audit , has 12,309 hectares in cultivation. RSPO is a trade organization that self-regulates the palm oil industry and has been accused of greenwashing several times. Nonetheless its work has increased transparency in the palm oil supply chain.
“Uumbal contracts with producers in the valleys of Palenque to create this discourse of sustainability, which it profits off in international markets by selling products with a sustainable palm oil seal,” explains the academic researcher Claudia Ramos.
The Esteve Recolons family, of Catalan origin but living in Mexico for two generations, owns Uumbal. The family also owns ECOM international, a Switzerland-based company that markets commodities in 30 countries in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa. Their main products are coffee, cotton and cocoa. To a lesser extent they sell grains and other agricultural products like pork. ECOM was founded in 1849 in Barcelona, Spain and in 2025 remains primarily a family business.
On June 1, 2021, the Esteve family established three businesses, according to the commercial register: Grupo Agroforest Uumbal SAPI de CV, Agroforestal Uumbal Chiapas SAPI de CV and Agroforestal Uumbal Veracruz SAPI de CV. These companies plant, cultivate, extract, refine and distribute oil palm.
In 2025, Uumbal and ECOM are both led by Jorge Esteve Recolons, one of Mexico’s most notorious businessmen of the last few years. In February this year he was named president of the National Food and Fishery Council, which is the national political action entity for industrial food companies. He is also the vice president of the Mexican Business Council, the country’s most powerful business interest group. It was founded in 1962 by Miguel Alemán (1900-1983), in whose estate the first oil palm in the country was planted, when Alemán was still president of Mexico.
Among the investors in Uumbal are other businesses associated with the same family: Agroindustrias Unidas de México S.A. de C.V. (AMSA), which has a similar profile to ECOM. AMSA is also connected to labor conflicts with community-based coffee farmers in Veracruz, who are demanding fair prices for their coffee beans. The company used false evidence to bring a legal case against them, in a clear case of a SLAPP, or Strategic Lawsuit against Public Participation, which are legal actions to intimidate activists, journalists and social movements.
At the end of January 2025, the National Coordinating Coffee Farmer Organization accused AMSA and Nestlé of punishing small-scale farmers and lowering the price for coffee beans through intermediary buyers . It appears this practice is also being used in the palm industry. In the area of Palenque and the valley of Tulijá, I spoke with several palm growers who said that Uumbal did not purchase what they had agreed to. They left tonnes of fruit to rot under the argument that they had too much production in their own plantations.
In the Shade of the Oil Palm
During a tour of palm cultivation in Tabasco, Campeche and Chiapas, we saw aging plantations, plantations that only provided enough for subsistence, and palms abandoned because of the high cost of moving the fruit. But we also saw highly-profitable producers who typically had new, mechanized plantations. These were the property of agro-industry groups that also own the oil extraction plants, and who will see the benefits of the new rail infrastructure that can move the products derived from their palms.
Some examples are Palmosur, previously Palma Tica, where the FA line of the Interoceanic Train passes by the extraction plants and the plants under cultivation. In other cases the palm industry converges with other extractive strategies, such as in the energy sector where Uumbal has explored making biofuel with palm oil, according to official records about the Mayan Train and associated energy projects.
That fact takes on more relevance considering that Mexico is positioning itself to “play a central role” in the expansion of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), according to Mexico’s communication and transportation secretary Jesús Esteva in a June 2025 statement. SAF can be made with the Jatropha plant, from used cooking oil or from palm oil.
The economic benefits could be significant, considering that the owner of Uumbal is also a major investor in Aeroméxico, the most important airline in Mexico. The airline’s 2024 sustainability plan said that 20 percent of its flights leaving Mexico will use SAF emissions. The airline said it is “actively promoting the development [of SAF] in the country in collaboration with key actors.”
Another overlap between oil palm and agro-industry is the use of bamboo for construction, a concept that is growing in popularity in Palenque. At one point Uumbal invested in this concept for housing for palm workers.
In November 2020, the architectural firm Lucilarq, S.A. de C.V., owned by Jorge Esteve Recolons and the architect Lucila Aguilar, received a contract for $5,835,549.52 Mexican pesos to design an «Urban and Architectural Conceptual Project for an Ecotourism Neighborhood in Palenque, Chiapas.» I made two trips to Palenque and could not find any evidence of this project. The Ministry of Tourism (FONATUR) and the Ministry of National Defense press offices were not aware of the project.
Lucila Aguilar is also a shareholder in other ECOM companies and her son Jorge Esteve Aguilar works in her firm. In an interview with the magazine Obras, which covers the construction industry, she said that Rogelio Jiménez Pons, the director of FONATUR and head of the Mayan Train project, invited her to “round tables to discuss how to preserve the rainforest.” That is where, she told the magazine, she proposed the “Barrio Palenque” idea, which would be build entirely with bamboo.
Another palm oil businessman entering the fray is Felipe Casanova Villanueva, who owns Bambú Maya. He is the son of cattle rancher Felipe Casanova Lastra, who owns the Agroindustria Oléica de la Región de los Ríos extraction plant, in partnership with Alejandro Aguilar Reséndez, who was Monsanto’s regional manager of agrochemicals and SAGARPA’s director of agriculture (2008-2012). According to his CV, he «designed and implemented the state oil palm project» while at SAGARPA.
This group received $18,691,815 Mexican pesos in 2011 from the Trusts Established in Relation to Agriculture (FIRA) for the production, planting, maintenance, and infrastructure development for oil palm. The funds were obtained individually and through the company Alta Genética de los Ríos SPR de RL.
It Didn’t Go Well For Everyone
Ten meters from Bermunda Bautista’s house the pavement ends and gives way to an underbrush that reverberates with the sounds of birds, insects and dozens of animals that inhabit the rainforest. The cacophony contrasts with the silence of the plantations of oil palm. Bautista, who everyone calls Munda, has few luxuries in her house made with concrete walls and floor and a sheet metal roof.
In 2001, Bautista and a group of women worked with livestock. A right-wing group of businessmen took power in Mexico. The new president, Vicente Fox, had been the chief executive of Coca-Cola in Mexico. He named Javier Usabiaga, an agro-businessman known as the “King of Garlic” to head SAGARPA. To lead the Secretariat of the Environment and Natural Resources he chose Alberto Cárdenas, the former governor of Jalisco and livestock businessman. They promised development for rural Mexico.
SAGARPA technical staff visited the areas that the government classified as viable land for African palm and convinced farmers to plant the crop. They gave away plants and paid five pesos ($0.55 USD) for each one planted. They promised that in three years the farmers would be harvesting the palm and the crop would be purchased. Munda remembers that it took five years for the extraction plants to open. She was among the 19,674 producers who agreed to join and jumpstart the palm project.
Aurelio Pérez Pérez was one of them. “We wanted to see what the plant was like, we planted a hectare and a half. That’s all, it wasn’t much.” Ultimately the price being offered for the fruit was very low and there weren’t roads to reach the extraction plant. In some areas there wasn’t even an extraction plant until the fifth year. Meanwhile it was the rural people who financed a good part of the development of the product and assumed the risks.
“I documented how there was hunger in the Tulijá region when palm prices went down, it’s not talked about much, but people were going hungry,” explains León Ávila, a professor at the Intercultural University of Chiapas (UNICH) and one of the main experts researching the social and environmental impacts of this monoculture. “This was when a kilo of the fruit from the oil palm was only at 90 cents of a pesos to 60 cents,” he remembers.
“A profound change in the industry is occurring, it is shifting to be a large-scale industry,” explained Anne Cristina de la Vega-Leinert, a geographer and founder of the Agro-Industry Observatory for Mexico. This transition is primarily occurring in Tabasco and Campeche,“in what can be called a palm corridor that spans from Veracruz to the Yucatan Peninsula.” De la Vega-Leinert and her team have been raising attention to this growth since 2019.
Like everything when it comes to oil palm, the shift from small scale producers to large agro-industry appears planned. All of the subsidies to campesinos have been eliminated, leaving them at a disadvantage compared to the large corporate actors. In 2022, Toledo Jamit himself complained that oil palm wasn’t a great business for him, compared to other political and business interest groups. “The rules of the game were locked in, which allowed private investors to get more resources than the public sector,” he said.
“This story repeats itself in other countries. It already happened in southeast Asia, where small scale farmers were the first to plant the crop and then later came the land grabbing and the resource grabbing,” explains Iliusi Vega, a physicist with a speciality in applied mathematics for biology who is a part of the Food Industry Observatory for Mexico.
The Mayan Train does not exclusively serve the development of palm oil – it is also vying for territory for other industrial megaprojects like GMO soy, mining and numerous energy sector projects. But the path for palm oil has already been laid out. The train incentivizes and favors this industry. The change in land tenure brought about by the train – from collective to private – appears to be accelerating the expansion of this crop and along with it incubating future social and environmental conflicts.
Este reportaje ha sido financiado como parte del Bertha Challenge 2025. Para saber más sobre este proyecto da click aquí.
- Calculation based on the total volume of palm oil and derivatives consumed in Mexico, including palm kernel oil, according to USDA and Femexpalma data on the average price during the Market Year (MY). The estimated value is US$1.488 billion with 55% value added for commercialization and processing. ↩︎
- https://www.gob.mx/cms/uploads/attachment/file/503575/Publicaci_n_21_-_Octubre_2019_-_Utilidad_de_la_Frontera_Agr_cola_en_el_estado_Tabasco.pdf ↩︎ ↩︎
- In 2024, Mexico imported US$463 million and exported US$11.6 million. The figures do not specify whether the exports were of palm oil produced in Mexico or of oils refined in Mexico and from countries such as Colombia and Guatemala. ↩︎
- The PRI was founded by the victors of the Mexican Revolution and governed the country as a state party for 71 years. ↩︎
- All peso to dollar conversions in this text are based on the average exchange rate for the year in question according to the Bank of Mexico. ↩︎
- According to public records requests ↩︎
- A. Cristina de la Vega-Leinert y Daniel Sandoval, Iliusi D. Vega del Valle, Jacqueline M. ↩︎
- Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Forestales Agrícolas y Pecuarias. ↩︎
- A. Cristina de la Vega-Leinert y Daniel Sandoval, Iliusi D. Vega del Valle, Jacqueline M.
Calzada-Mendoza, Peter Clausing, (Opcit) ↩︎ - The Marines and the Army manage the Mayan Train and the Interoceanic Train ↩︎
- Castellanos-Navarrete, Antonio, Marcela A. Colocho-Rodríguez y Nicolás Vargas-Ramírez. «Does community-based tenure prevent land grabbing? The oil palm case in Mexico.» Applied Geography 172 (2024): 103413. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2024.103413 ↩︎
Bertha Fellow 2025. Periodista, corresponsal y editor especializado en América Latina. Ha colaborado con más de 40 medios en 25 países. Tiene un master en Estudios Internacionales. Se ha desempeñado como consultor de comunicación política para ONGs y organismos internacionales. Premio de periodismo Rostros de la Discriminación, 2022. Becario Balboa 2007. Director fundador de Comestible.info
