Mexico plants 8 million trees in latest green project

Mexicans went out and planted more than 8 million trees across the country on Saturday as part of a government push to shed its reputation for environmental mismanagement and rampant illegal logging.

Packs of volunteers, including oil workers and schoolchildren, trekked into fields and forests up and down Mexico wielding shovels and wheelbarrows full of government-supplied saplings. They planted a 8.3 million trees, the environment ministry said.

"We are repairing just a little of the enormous damage that we are doing" to the environment, President Felipe Calderon said at a tree planting event just north of the capital.

Illegal logging destroys some 64,000 acres (26,000 hectares) of Mexican forest each year, the government says, putting Mexico near the top of a U.N. list of nations losing primary forest fastest.

Environmental activists say the figure is much higher.

"Everybody needs to help out a little to keep the world green," said volunteer Marcela Lopez as she patted down soil around a sapling on the west side of Mexico City.

Environmental group Greenpeace called the government-led effort a publicity stunt, saying a better way to keep forests healthy would be to cut back on logging, which is often controlled by the country's powerful organized crime gangs.

"This program is a fraud. Only 10 percent of what is planted survives, which means they are throwing the federal budget for reforestation straight into the garbage," the group said in a statement.

Calderon regularly speaks out against global warming, and the leftwing Mexico City mayor has launched a number of green initiatives to curb rampant pollution in the city, where government fuel subsidies and a lack of public transport mean the roads are permanently choked with cars.

Mexican Environment Minister Juan Rafael Elvira said the point of the tree planting was to raise environmental consciousness in Mexico, which ecologists also criticize for allowing the oil industry to contaminate many rural states.

"We don't just want a green country. We want to plant trees to nurture environmental conscience," he said.