Tequila Growers Hurting as Industry Turns to Big Farms

Feb. 9, 2009 -- 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.

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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.