Tequila is legendary for teaching hard lessons, and now it's offering them to communities around the world that produce distinctive foodstuffs, according to a North Carolina State University researcher.
Sales of the liquor have boomed with globalization. The rural parts of Mexico where it is produced, though, are struggling financially and with pollution because of a Mexican law that was supposed to protect its origins, according to a study by Sarah Bowen, an assistant professor in the university's sociology and anthropology department. She found that the law does little to protect small farmers and local economies.
"There's a lot of great tequila out there, but the rules aren't written in the right way to protect the farmers and the communities," Bowen said.
Such rules and regulations already cover products including wines, vinegars, hams, sausages, olives, beers, and even breads. The likes of Champagne, balsamic vinegar and Gorgonzola cheese can be labeled as such only if they come from a designated region and meet other regulations aimed at preserving their producers and distinctive qualities.
The study, co-written with Ana Valenzuela Zapata, a biologist at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico was published this month in the Journal of Rural Studies.
Under Mexican law, to be officially designated as tequila, the liquor and the blue agave cactus must come from a tightly defined region in five Mexican states. Bowen and her co-author studied the area around Amatitan, a town where tequila is believed to have first been made.
Agave takes at least six years to mature, which makes it hard for farmers to react to demand cycles. In the early part of this decade, a major agave shortage put many small tequila makers out of business and prompted larger ones to plant their own agave rather than rely on the small farmers, Bowen said.
That not only cut into farm income, but large companies used more pesticides, which polluted water supplies. Large-scale agricultural practices may have increased outbreaks of pests and disease, Bowen said.
The French devised the idea of protecting foods and agricultural products. Production areas were set for wines, cheeses and other products as early as the 15th century.
Such regulations have soared in popularity. Even with the tense relations between India and Pakistan, for example, the countries are working on an agreement to prevent companies from labeling rice produced elsewhere as genuine Basmati.
Well-written regulations that protect a product and its small producers help everyone from growers to consumers, said Mary Booth, a Durham native and former buyer for Whole Foods, who traveled in Europe for the supermarket chain.
"To get one of these designations usually means that a region has proven to a government that the product has a certain level of quality and distinctive characteristics," Booth said. "If you're a grower, you don't want someone in the next valley to be able to slap your label on what may be an inferior product."
Bowen picked tequila not because of its notoriety, but because the 1974 law protecting it is the oldest outside Europe. There was enough history to study the effects.
In many ways, the law has been successful, she said. Sales have more than doubled in the past 15 years, and quality has improved, leading other Latin American countries to look to tequila as they ponder protections.
Bowen is also studying laws that protect Comte, a hard cheese made in eastern France -- laws that she said have done a terrific job. Among other things, they mandate that milk used for the cheese come from cows fed mainly by grazing rather than factory-produced feeds, protecting small farmers who own pasture land.
(E-mail Jay Price at jay.price(at)newsobserver.com)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C.
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