If you talk with enough agave geeks, you’ll hear that agave is endangered. And that’s not wrong – but it’s also not accurate. Agave is a resilient plant. It can (and does) grow (and thrive) in some of the most inhospitable climates you can imagine. So … how is it at risk of extinction?
There’s something like 158 recognized species of agave in Mexico. Each of those species has multiple varieties. So we’re talking literally thousands of different kinds of agave. Some of those varieties grow in a broad geographic area. Others, not so much.
The IUCN Red List is the gold standard for evaluating the level of risk of extinction for plants and animals. The last time I checked, in 2023, they considered 156 species of agave. (Again, each species will have a number of varieties.) Four of them, they don’t have sufficient data to determine if there’s any risk (including agave Rhodacantha, an agave that is both farmed and also harvested from the wild to make spirits, labeled commonly as Mexicano in most of Oaxaca, Cuishe in a few places in Oaxaca, Amarillo in Jalisco).
Seventy-seven of the agave species listed are recognized as Least Concern.
Three are Near Threatened.
Thirty-three are Vulnerable.
Twenty are listed as Endangered.
Eighteen are listed as Critically Endangered.
One is Extinct in the wild, Agave lurida. No one is certain the cause, though the researchers note that “The habitat where the species used to occur shows signs of disturbance by overgrazing.”
The reason for Mexico’s diminishing biodiversity isn’t that we’re drinking too much wild agave, as some agave geeks would suggest. No, the problem is, we aren’t drinking enough wild agave.
When we drink spirits made from agave 96.5 times out of a hundred, we’re drinking one variety of one species of agave: Blue Weber. The only agave that can be used to make Tequila. And the vast majority of that is made in one state – Jalisco – from plants also grown in that state. Our mindless consumption of Tequila has created a monoculture – and, not for nothing, a genetically homogenous monoculture. That’s threatening the bio-diversity of the state, putting at risk the long-term stability of the population of that state.
Now, the other 3.5 times out of a hundred that we’re drinking a spirit made from agave, we’re probably drinking something that would be called “Mezcal.” In 2022, just over 91% of all Mezcal was made in Oaxaca (one of nine states, at the time, where an agave spirit could be certified as Mezcal), and just over 88% of it was made with one variety of one species of agave: Espadin. So that monoculture that we created in Jalisco with Blue Weber agave? We’re repeating that same environmental damage now in Oaxaca.
So, why is that? The vast majority of people drinking Mezcal are ordering a Mezcal Margarita or Oaxacan Old-Fashioned and leaving it to the bar to decide which Mezcal goes in the glass. And the choice is largely a Mezcal made from farmed Espadin. And that farmed Espadin is coming from land that used to provide food for local consumption or was wild land that served as habitat to plants, insects, and animals that are all at-risk of disappearing.
But even our mindless consumption of Tequila and Mezcal aren’t the real problem. Combined production of those agave spirits in 2022, according to their respective leading certifying bodies, was just shy of 656 million liters. Three years earlier, in 2019, before Modelo became the best-selling beer in the USA, beer production in Mexico was 124.5 million hectaliters -- emphasis on the hecta. That's 12.45 billion liters of beer -- which is just shy of 20 times the amount of Tequila and Mezcal produced.
The idea that people drinking spirits made from wild agave are putting the populations of those agave at risk with their consumption is wrong and also misses the point. It conflates the preservation of agave species and the preservation of agaves in the wild. And that's not wrong.
No one is stressed about the absolute disappearance of wild corn, wild wheat, wild name-your-farmed-grain. The suggestion that somehow drinking Mezcal made from farmed Espadin will preserve the wild populations of Tepextate is ridiculous. Because those wild lands populated with wild Tepextate will be replaced by fields of farmed Espadin in service to our actual consumption patterns.
So if you want to preserve Tepextate ... well, you won't preserve it in the wild. The wild land is disappearing in service to all of our consumption patterns. Of those 156 species of agave considered by the IUCN Red List, 74 fall somewhere between Near Threatened and Critically Endangered. Of those 74, only ten are noted as being at some level of endangerment due to spirits production: Karwinskii, Nuusaviorum, Valenciana, Potatorum, Cupreata, Convallis, Macroacantha, Titanota, Montium-sancticaroli, and Jaiboli.
The other 64? It’s habitat destruction – like urban sprawl, highway developments, tourism, mining. It’s farming, which gets us back to all that barley grown in service of all of that beer. It’s cattle ranching. Even collector-poaching ranks as a bigger threat than spirits production. Then there’s wildfires, drought, and rising sea levels: climate change.
And those ten that are attributable to spirits production? In the case of the two most widely used for Mezcal – Cupreata and Potatorum – the studies the IUCN Red List used to make their determination note " the wild populations have been completely extirpated and have been replaced by plantations of the same species." In other words, there are varieties of Cupreata that are at-risk because Mezcal producers are farming a single variety and doing so on lands that once were home to multiple varieties of Cupreata.
So if you want to preserve biodiversity in agaves – if you want to ensure Tepextate survives into the next decade – drink it. Drink it and pay a lot for it. Because things we pay a lot for don't disappear -- they get preserved so we can continue paying a lot for it.