The Sustainability Challenges That Threaten the Agave Industry

Purified syrup from the agave sap is sold in the US as agave nectar, even though it doesn’t come from agave flowers like the name might suggest. Agave nectar has gained popularity as an alternative sweetener, specifically as a vegan alternative to honey, as it has a similar ratio of fructose, glucose and other sugars. Experts debate whether it has health benefits above other sugars — it’s naturally high in fructose, which makes it sweeter than other sugars per calorie, so people might use slightly less of it than other sweeteners. Food companies tout the fructans in the nectar as a natural source of fiber, but some nutritionists warn agave nectar is nearly identical to the much-maligned high fructose corn syrup. Regardless of its health effects, the market for agave nectar is projected to keep growing.

However, the main driver of agave demand is alcohol. The Aztecs fermented agave sap into a milky alcoholic beverage called pulque. It’s still consumed in Mexico but has limited appeal abroad. It’s unclear whether distillation was practiced by ancient Mesoamericans or if it was introduced by Spanish colonists, but distilled agave spirits are now consumed worldwide. Tequila, which is made only from the blue agave, is the most popular. A smokier kind of agave spirit, mezcal, is made from a wider range of agave varieties, some wild-collected and some cultivated.

Tequila consumption outside of Mexico has traditionally been driven by lower-quality spirits used in cocktails like the margarita, but artisanal and high-quality tequilas have become far more widespread in recent years. The explosion of artisanal tequilas has contributed to rapid growth in the tequila market, with sales nearly quadrupling since 2002. Mezcal is also booming in popularity: imports to the US surged 50 percent in 2019, overtaking consumption in Mexico itself.

Boom and Bust Cycles

The dramatic rise in demand for agave products of all kinds has significant consequences for the farmers who grow it. Because the agave plant matures so slowly — seven years in the case of the blue agave, and more for many others — prices are prone to natural boom and bust cycles.In years when many plants mature at the same time, prices have fallen as low as two pesos per kilo of agave. When demand is high but there are few mature plants on the market, however, they can rise to 25 pesos per kilo or higher. At the moment, the market appears to be heading out of a high-demand, high-price period so severe that many agave industry analysts sounded the alarm over a potential tequila shortage.

These spikes might sound lucrative, but it’s hard to take advantage of this cycle; consumer demand is constantly shifting, and agave growers can’t change what they’re planting as quickly as farmers who grow annual crops like corn. Planting more agaves in a year when prices are high might only make a future glut that much worse. Some turn to harvesting immature plants, which contain far less sugar. Not only does this early harvesting mean lower-quality syrup, it also prolongs shortages and leaves farmers worse off, since it’s effectively borrowing plants from the future. These market disturbances can ultimately force farmers off the land: the number of agave farmers went from 15,000 in 2000 to 8,000 after a particularly dramatic cycle in 2007.

The booming market for agave products and the accompanying price roller coaster have serious environmental consequences. Mezcal makers have responded to the drink’s meteoric rise by ramping up their collection of the wild agaves, alarming environmentalists who fear the slow-growing populations may not be able to recover. This isn’t an issue for tequila or the majority of commercially available agave nectars because they use only cultivated blue agaves, but those growers have ramped up chemical use on the farm to keep up. The practice of early harvesting has also become more common, and this presents another challenge by removing a critical food source from the desert: the agave’s flowers.

Bats: a Critical Pollinator

To protect against the drying effects of the sun, many desert plants open their flowers only at night. This makes bats an important pollinator in the desert, and plants often have special pollinator relationships with only one species of bat. This is true for agaves, which rely almost entirely on long-nosed bats for pollination. With their long tongues, the bats are one of the few animals that can access nectar from the agave’s tubular flowers.In return, they spread the agave’s pollen from flower to flower. Bats are one of the only ways wild agaves can reproduce — plants exposed to bats produce nearly 3,000 viable seeds for every seed made by a plant that wasn’t.

Cultivated agaves don’t technically need pollination; most are grown from small offsets off a mother plant. But these offsets are technically clones, and while this ensures a field of plants that all have the same characteristics which will produce an even and predictable product, the technique comes at the cost of genetic diversity. When bats are allowed to pollinate plants, genes combine in unique ways, and many beneficial traits — like disease resistance or drought tolerance — can emerge. Large, genetically identical fields are potentially vulnerable to being wiped out all at once by pests or disease. This has already happened in the past: a wave of fungal infections in the mid-1990s swept through cloned blue agave fields and sent prices skyrocketing. Ironically, the subsequent push to replant all the lost crop at once sparked an oversupply of agave years later and sent prices toppling.

Because they are so interconnected, any disturbance to the bats can impact the entire agave industry: wild plants are important to mezcal producers who use them directly, and cultivated agaves ultimately come from wild sources, so bat pollination is one of the agave industry’s only sources of genetic diversity. Removing the bats’ main food sources by harvesting immature agaves in the field and overharvesting immature wild agaves ultimately shortchanges the agave industry’s long term survival.

Unfortunately, early harvesting isn’t the only threat facing the bats: Drug traffickers along the US-Mexico border use the caves where bats roost as hideouts and caches for shipments, disturbing the animals’ nesting. Ranchers trying to eliminate vampire bats, which nest in the same caves as long-nosed bats, also intentionally destroy the nesting habitat.