The word ‘land’ does a lot of work in the agave world. It shapes flavor, determines which species can grow where, and anchors the cultural identity of communities that have been tending these plants for generations. But land is also a legal and economic reality, and for tens of thousands of agave-farming families across Mexico, the right to farm their traditional territories is under pressure from multiple directions at once.
Large tequila and mezcal corporations have spent the past decade planting agave on an industrial scale, flooding markets and collapsing prices to the point where a kilo of agave that sold for 35 pesos in 2022 was fetching as little as one peso by 2025. In Oaxaca, more than 34,953 hectares of tropical dry and pine-oak forest disappeared over 27 years as plantations expanded, displacing traditional farming systems and putting communal territories under new strain. The ejido and bienes comunales systems that protect communal land ownership in Mexico are imperfect shields when bureaucratic processes move slowly, middlemen operate with impunity, and regulatory bodies answer to industry more than to farmers.
The organizations listed here work in different ways and from different angles, some through cooperative economics, others through conservation law, still others through direct advocacy. What they share is a recognition that agave producers cannot protect their craft or their communities if they cannot protect their land.
1. Sanzekan Tinemi
Location: Chilapa de Alvarez, Guerrero | Founded: 1990
The name means ‘always together’ in Nahuatl, and the cooperative has operated on that principle since its founding. Sanzekan Tinemi began in the difficult economic conditions of the 1980s, when indigenous communities in Guerrero’s central mountain region organized to access credit, subsidized goods, and agricultural support that the state was failing to provide. Mezcal was one piece of a broader rural development strategy.
Today the organization unites 1,200 members across the municipalities of Chilapa de Alvarez, Zitlala, Ahuacuotzingo, and Tixtla, representing roughly 30,000 people when extended family units are counted. It operates 32 palenques under a collective brand and runs its own nurseries, ensuring that wild Agave cupreata (papalote) populations remain viable through a program that reforests approximately 1.5 million plants per year. Soil conservation works, water retention systems, and biofilters for wastewater management at each distillation site round out an integrated approach to land stewardship.
The cooperative model itself is the land rights mechanism here. By holding shared assets and setting prices through consensus rather than at the mercy of coyotes (middlemen), Sanzekan gives its members the economic stability to stay on the land rather than migrating for wage labor. Each bottle carries the hand-signed name of the maestro mezcalero who made it, the harvest date, and the batch number. The land is present in every label.
geaac.org | sanzekan.org
2. Grupo de Estudios Ambientales, A.C. (GEA)
Location: Mexico City, with field work in Guerrero and beyond | Founded: mid-1980s
GEA is the civil society organization most responsible for developing the model of campesino agave forestry management that now serves as a reference point across Mexico. Working in close collaboration with Nahuatl mezcal-producing communities in Guerrero, the organization spent years conducting participatory action research into the population dynamics of wild Agave cupreata, then helped communities translate that data into governance structures. Harvest thresholds are reviewed by community assemblies based on annual monitoring of plant population indicators, so decisions about how many mature agaves can be taken each season are made by the community, not by outside buyers.
GEA’s broader mission explicitly connects land management to rights: the organization works toward ‘the full exercise of the collective and individual rights of women and men’ in the Mexican rural environment. It convened the first National Meeting of Agave Forestry Managers in 2015, which led to a Non-Timber Forest Products Research Network that has continued to hold national meetings as a space for producers to share management strategies and engage collectively on questions of regulation and territorial rights. The organization has also reforested more than 500 hectares in its core areas of operation.
For agave producers, GEA represents something specific: the idea that rigorous ecological knowledge, held and applied by the community, can be the foundation of territorial sovereignty.
geaac.org
3. Guardianas del Mezcal
Location: Santa Maria Zoquitlan and surrounding communities, Oaxaca | Founded: 2018
Gladys Sanchez Garnica grew up in a mezcal-producing family in rural Oaxaca, learned to read the land’s limits from her parents, and watched the global boom arrive and begin transforming the hillsides around her. In 2018 she founded the Guardianas del Mezcal, a women’s collective of agave farmers and producers that advocates for sustainable land-use practices within the mezcal economy.
The collective operates on a code of practice: members use only fallen trees for firewood rather than cutting live timber, intercrop agave with other species to preserve soil structure, and replant harvested areas. But the Guardianas have also pursued something harder to achieve: formal territorial protection. Working with the conservation project Tierra de Agaves and local community officials, the collective helped secure protected status for 26,000 hectares of forest surrounding Santa Maria Zoquitlan, giving the community a legally recognized claim over lands that sustain their agave populations and their livelihoods.
That effort is the core of what land rights work looks like in practice in Oaxaca. The Guardianas did not do it alone, but they were the engine.
4. Tierra de Agaves
Location: Oaxaca Central Valleys | Active: ongoing
Tierra de Agaves operates as a conservation project focused on reforesting parts of Oaxaca’s valleys and promoting sustainable agave production throughout the mezcal supply chain. One of its defining contributions has been navigating Mexico’s notoriously slow permitting processes alongside community partners, rather than leaving producers to work around bureaucratic delays in ways that expose them to legal risk.
The organization was instrumental in the effort that secured protected territorial status for 26,000 hectares of forest around Santa Maria Zoquitlan, a project it undertook in collaboration with the Guardianas del Mezcal and local community authorities. That kind of conservation-legal hybrid work is increasingly important as agave production expands and the boundaries between communal forest and plantation land become contested.
For small producers, access to the Tierra de Agaves network means access to technical knowledge, legal pathways, and the kind of documented land stewardship record that matters when rights are challenged.
5. Pronatura Sur
Location: Oaxaca | Regional conservation organization
Pronatura Sur is one of Mexico’s established regional conservation organizations, and in the agave world it has taken on a role that goes beyond environmental protection in the traditional sense. The organization serves as the implementing partner for a project funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and led by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) that works directly with agave-farming collectives including the Guardianas del Mezcal.
Through this project, Pronatura Sur provides the collectives with agroforestry training, soil and water conservation practices, legal support, business planning, and marketing assistance. As of early 2026 the project had strengthened sustainable land management and agave restoration for 157 producers. The legal support component is particularly relevant to land rights: producers who can document their land stewardship practices, demonstrate compliance with environmental standards, and access formal legal guidance are far better positioned to defend their territorial claims than those who lack that institutional backing.
Pronatura Sur’s involvement also signals the increasing convergence of conservation agendas and producer rights agendas in Oaxaca, a convergence that benefits both.
pronatura-sur.org
6. Consejo Mexicano del Agave (CMXDA)
Location: Tequila, Jalisco | Founded: recent years
The Mexican Agave Council fights on a different front than the conservation organizations above. Its primary battleground is the tequila industry, where 42,000 agave-farming families have watched the price of their crop collapse while major producers self-supply more agave from their own plantations and middle-market corruption has allegedly allowed adulterated tequila to undercut the market for genuine 100-percent-agave product.
Spokesperson Remberto Galvan Cabrera, whose family has deep roots in Jalisco agrarian struggles, frames the crisis in terms of monopolistic practices that the Mexican constitution prohibits. Large producers, the CMXDA argues, implemented massive agave-planting strategies from around 2015 onward specifically to control market prices, marginalizing smallholders and disrupting the traditional supply chain. When the price of a kilo of agave falls below what it costs to grow it, farmers lose the economic basis for remaining on the land.
The CMXDA has organized major protests in Tequila, Jalisco, submitted petitions to state and federal governments, and called for structural reforms including a minimum agave price, accountability from the Tequila Regulatory Council (CRT), and the abolition of the practices that allow middlemen to extract value from farmers. Galvan himself has been physically threatened and attacked for his advocacy. The stakes are not abstract.
cmxda.org
7. Barzón Agavero
Location: Jalisco, Guanajuato, Nayarit, Michoacan, and Tamaulipas | Founded: approximately 30 years ago
Barzón Agavero may be the oldest of the farmer advocacy organizations currently active in the tequila agave belt. Founded by René Beas Jimenez roughly three decades ago, it now brings together at least 45,000 families across five states. Beas Jimenez, who was recently sworn in as head of the national producer council CNPA, has been unambiguous about the nature of the problem: the organization represents ‘the legitimate interests of those who live on the land and suffer the arbitrary decisions of a market intentionally saturated to drive down prices.’
The price collapse Barzón documents is severe. Agave that sold for 35 pesos per kilo in 2022 dropped to one peso per kilo by 2025, with coyotes offering that figure to farmers who risked losing their product entirely if they refused. Barzón’s policy demands include limits on how much blue agave tequila producers can plant for self-supply, arguing that companies which now source up to 90 percent of their agave internally have effectively removed smallholders from the market.
Keeping farmers on the land, in Barzón’s analysis, requires more than sentiment. It requires regulation that prevents vertically integrated corporations from using their planting capacity as a weapon against independent producers.
What These Organizations Share
None of these organizations operates in isolation, and their strategies reflect the different shapes that land pressure takes depending on geography and industry context. In Guerrero and Oaxaca, the threats are often ecological, bureaucratic, and structural: communal forest converted to monoculture, permitting systems that favor large producers, and markets that reward industrial volume over artisanal quality. In Jalisco and the tequila belt, the pressure is more directly economic, with corporate planting strategies and pricing manipulation squeezing smallholders out of a market their families built.
What unites all seven is an understanding that land rights, for agave producers, are not purely about title documents. They are about the economic conditions that make it possible to stay on the land, the ecological conditions that make the land worth staying on, and the political conditions that give producers a voice in decisions that affect both. Sustaining that voice is, ultimately, what each of these organizations is working to do.
When the price of a kilo of agave falls below what it costs to grow it, farmers lose the economic basis for remaining on the land. That is the simplest possible definition of a land rights crisis.
For consumers, this matters too. Every bottle that rewards a sustainable small producer over an industrial operation is, in a modest way, a vote for the continued existence of the landscapes and communities these organizations are working to protect. Knowing who is doing that work, and why it is necessary, is part of drinking with intention.