Mezcal's popularity is booming in the US. That comes with a growing environmental cost in Mexico

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SAN PEDRO TOTOLAPAM, Mexico (AP) — Thirty years ago, a single light bulb would illuminate the mezcal distillery owned by Gladys Sánchez Garnica's family in rural Oaxaca, where the agave-based spirit was made through the night. As drops dripped from a clay oven, Garnica and her siblings listened to stories told by their parents while neighbors arrived by horse to get a taste of a drink known for its smoky flavor.

“We were taught when to harvest agave, how to care for the soil, and how much we could ask of the forest,” said Garnica, 33, speaking from a women-owned distillery in San Pedro Totolapam, a town of just over 3,000 residents in Mexico's Oaxacan Central Valleys, where much of the economy depends on mezcal.

Today, that small-scale tradition exists alongside a global boom that has transformed mezcal into a major industry dominated by international brands. As mezcal has spread to bars around the world, so has its footprint on the land. Along the road to communities like San Luis del Rio, where celebrity brands such as Dos Hombres, created by actors Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul from the hit series “Breaking Bad,” are made, agave plantations now blanket hillsides that were once forest. While the boom has brought economic benefits for many local producers, it's also led to rising environmental costs.

Production in Mexico has gone from about 1 million liters (264,172 gallons) in 2010 to more than 11 million (2.9 million gallons) in 2024, according to COMERCAM, the country’s mezcal regulatory body. Nearly all is produced in Oaxaca, but less than 30% remains in Mexico. About 75% of exports go to the United States.

In two major mezcal-producing areas of Oaxaca, more than 34,953 hectares (86,370 acres) of tropical dry and pine oak forests have been lost in 27 years to make room for agave, an area roughly equivalent to the size of the U.S. city of Detroit, according to a study led by Rufino Sandoval-García, a professor at the Technological University of the Central Valley of Oaxaca.

The study found that agave plantations in the two areas have expanded by over 400% the past three decades, increasingly replacing forests and farmland with a species of agave known as espadin, used in most commercial mezcal.

That is accelerating soil erosion, reducing by 4 million tons per year the amount of carbon dioxide captured by forests, limiting the land’s ability to recharge groundwater and creating heat islands in heavily planted areas, according to the study.

“It will take a long time for the ecosystem to recover the resilience it once had,” said Sandoval-García.

One liter (0.26 gallons) of mezcal can require at least 10 liters (2.64 gallons) of water for fermentation and distillation, and generates waste such as bagazo, the pulpy residue left after the juice has been extracted, and vinazas, or wastewater, often dumped untreated into rivers. Large quantities of firewood are also burned to roast agave pineapples and fuel distillation, much of which comes from illegal logging, according to Sandoval-García.

For generations, the environmental impacts of the spirit remained limited by its small scale and the ability of surrounding forests and soils to recover. That balance is now fragile.

Félix Monterrosa, a third-generation producer from Santiago Matatlan who owns Oaxacan brand CUISH, said the boom of industrial mezcal displaced the milpa system he learned from his ancestors, in which corn, beans and pumpkin were grown alongside agave.

“Now everything is monoculture, and that is the real problem,” Monterrosa said. In his town, decades of dumping mezcal waste into the river have left it so polluted that residents nicknamed it the “Nilo,” short for “ni lo huelas,” or in English: “don’t even smell it.”

Monterrosa now plants wild agaves alongside corn and trees to restore biodiversity, though he said maintaining the system at scale remains a challenge.

Water is an increasing concern across Oaxaca, which experienced its worst drought in more than a decade in 2024, according to Mexico’s National Water Commission.

Armando Martínez Ruiz, a producer in Soledad Salinas who sells his mezcal to Mexican brand Amaras, installed a system to cool and reuse water during distillation.

“We never had enough water here, so I try not to waste it,” he said.

While major companies highlight sustainability commitments, their third-party contracts with distilleries are typically limited to purchasing mezcal in bulk. Producers say those agreements rarely cover the costs of raw materials, workers’ wages or maintenance of their distilleries.

Del Maguey, one of the world’s top-selling mezcal brands, says they are working to reduce their environmental footprint by planting trees. Over the past five years, the company reused more than 5,000 tons of bagazo and 2 million liters (528,344 gallons) of vinaza to build a raised platform at a distillery in San Luis del Rio to prevent flooding and contamination, according to its head of sustainability, Gabriel Bonfanti.

For many, the boom has been a lifeline in a region with some of the highest poverty rates in Mexico.

Luis Cruz Velasco, a producer from San Luis del Rio who works with Mexican brands like Bruxo, said the growth has created jobs for nearly every family in his town of about 300 residents. Where previous generations lived in thatched houses, mezcal income has helped his siblings to attend university.

“There are many people who criticize us and ask what we do to reforest,” Velasco said. “But we have to look for a livelihood and food.”

For Velasco, the problem is not the entry of large brands, which he says have done more than the government to support marginalized areas like his, but the lack of public incentives for farmers to safeguard environments by planting native trees or maintaining traditional farming systems.

In Oaxaca, much land is communally owned and managed through local systems of self-governance. Converting forest into agave plantations requires federal approval from Mexico’s Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources.

The permitting process is so slow and bureaucratic that some communities choose to bypass it, said Helena Iturribarria from Tierra de Agaves, a conservation project to reforest parts of Oaxaca’s valleys and promote sustainable agave production.

The Secretary of Environment said in a statement it had not received requests for forest clearing for agave cultivation in the past three years in Oaxaca. The agency also said it was investigating nine public complaints filed since 2021 over illegal land clearing for mezcal production.

In 2018, Garnica founded a collective of women called the “Guardians of Mezcal.” The group is promoting mezcal produced by women using sustainable practices, including using only fallen trees for firewood and planting agave alongside other crops.

With help from Tierra de Agaves, Guardians of Mezcal and local community officials from Santa Maria Zoquitlan secured projected status for 26,000 hectares of forest surrounding the town.

“Mezcal is a way of life, like a form of work that our parents taught us, so it really means a lot,” Garnica said. “If there is a funeral, a wedding, a party, mezcal is a drink you are going to share with others, and above all many families depend on it.”

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Reporting for this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage also receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.