Tequila Growers Hurting as Industry Turns to Big Farms

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For many people, drinking tequila is a good way to forget life's worries -- at least for a while. But behind each sip of salt-rimmed margarita is an agricultural system that is filled with worry, according to a new study.

While the tequila industry has grown tremendously in recent years, changing industry practices are shutting out small-scale Mexican farmers and damaging the environment of the region where agave plants are grown for tequila production.

"There are a lot of ways that [tequila] has been really successful," said Sarah Bowen, a sociologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. "But not for everyone."

Like Roquefort cheese and Champagne, laws require that tequila be made only a specific part of the world. Designated areas like these are called geographical indications, or GIs, and GIs are designed to add value to a product.

The idea is that a region's climate, soil properties and other geographic peculiarities produce unique flavors that can't be created anywhere else. In many cases, GIs have also lent cultural and historical pride to a region, supporting independent farmers and traditional farming techniques.

In Mexico, things haven't worked out so well, Bowen said. She focused her research on one community in the Mexican state of Jalisco, where tequila production began more than 400 years ago. Jalisco, along with parts of four other states, earned GI status in 1974, making tequila the first GI outside of Europe. To be called tequila, at least 51 percent of a bottle's contents must be made from blue agave plants grown within designated boundaries.

These days, transnational companies like Cuervo do most of the tequila making, but the process is the same as it always was: First, leaves are plucked. Then, the plant's pineapple-like hearts are roasted, crushed, fermented, and distilled into tequila.

The trouble for tequila companies is that agave is not a particularly reliable crop. It takes between six and 10 years from the time a seed is planted until it can be harvested, so variable growing conditions lead to cycles of boom and bust. And bad years create shortages that lack a quick fix.

Those cycles have been getting worse in recent years, with an especially extreme shortage in the 1990s, even as worldwide demand for tequila has continued to escalate. To protect themselves against the uncertainties, companies started growing up to 90 percent of their own agave instead of relying on small farmers to provide the crop.

That switch has been tough on farmers, who have long relied on agave for their main source of income.

"Farmers were really concerned," Bowen told Discovery News. She and colleague Ana Valenzuela Zapata conducted extensive interviews and workshops with farmers, government officials, tequila producers and other players in the industry. Their analyses appeared in the January issue of the Journal of Rural Studies.

"It's a desperate situation," she said. "They're not aware of all the politics in the industry, but they are aware that it is becoming almost impossible to sell agave and that tequila companies are cutting them out."

Compared to traditional methods, tequila companies also use far more herbicides and pesticides, and they are less likely to intersperse agave with other crops. These practices have increased soil erosion and reduced water quality. Ironically, they've also led to higher levels of pest infestation and disease, Bowen said.

Stricter rules by the Mexican government would be necessary to make tequila successful for both companies and farmers, said Peter Gerritson, a rural sociologist at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico. He also suggested narrowing the size of the GI, which is now relatively large and spread out, to help revive the spirit of what the designation was meant to do in the first place: create unique flavors and inspire regional pride.

"Tequila is promoted as the national drink of Mexico," Gerritson said. "It has this geological indication, which gives the idea of a locally-based product that is related to its region and natural resources. I think the message of this work is that, well, it is much more complex than that."