Mexico’s president-elect traveled on Saturday to the Lacandon jungle rainforest in Chiapas to plan an ambitious reforestation project covering at least 200,000 hectares.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador unveiled the plan — estimated to cost 6 billion pesos (US $322 million) — while on the campaign trail earlier this year.

The Lacandon reforestation is part of a larger project in which López Obrador wants to plant trees on one million hectares in Chiapas and Tabasco.

He intends to plant fruit and timber-yielding trees in a program that is not only about the environment, but jobs.

The project will give landowners financial incentives that will allow them to pay fair wages to farmworkers.

He said 80,000 “permanent, not temporary, jobs” could be created.

The people of Chiapas will be able to “put down roots, work and be happy in the place they were born . . . and those that want to leave can do so because they want to and not because they need to.”

There will be work in the villages and communities and in all the ejidos (communal landholdings) of Chiapas, he predicted.

Source: El Imparcial (sp)