Читать книгу Green Gone Wrong - Heather Rogers - Страница 8
ОглавлениеAll the World’s a Garden: Global Organic
Most of Paraguay remains unmapped. The landlocked country lies in the heart of South America, surrounded by Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia. In the nineteenth century Paraguay was among the first countries on the continent to build a railroad; its extensive tracks reached far into the countryside and were still in use until recent decades. But the military dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, who ruled from 1954 until 1989, left the railways in tatters. Paraguay’s eastern expanse is interlaced with uncharted dirt roads built to access villages and fields, and as an initial step in deforestation. The subtropical Upper Paraná Atlantic Forest, said to be among the most biodiverse in the world, is home to a wealth of plants and rich with fauna including jaguars, tapirs, a plethora of reptiles and amphibians, and over five hundred species of birds. However, it is continuously being transformed into cattle pasture and immense stretches of commodity crops such as soy, wheat, and, increasingly, sugarcane.
The native Atlantic Forest once carpeted about 100 million acres, an area comprising eastern Paraguay and crossing over into Brazil and Argentina. Perhaps surprisingly, and until only recently, Paraguay had one of the highest deforestation rates in Latin America. Today just 8 percent of the primary Upper Paraná ecosystem remains. The destruction began to decelerate in late 2004 when the government enacted law no. 2524/4, the so-called Zero Deforestation Law, for the Atlantic Forest region. Although the World Wildlife Fund reports the measure has dramatically slowed the felling of trees, the casual observer can’t help but see that clearing nevertheless continues.
In the state of Guairá, the country’s primary sugar-growing region, only a few main arteries are paved; everything else is dirt, and it’s easy to get lost. There may be small hand-painted signs, which should sometimes be followed, other times not. A driver might unexpectedly hit a makeshift roadblock of felled trees piled high, or an unmarked, sudden drop-off. Few private automobiles travel these rural roads, but bicycles are everywhere, and so are pedestrians—in the remotest spots and along the biggest thoroughfares, all day and late into the night. The motorized vehicles I see most often are cheap, domestically assembled motorcycles and lumbering eighteen-wheelers piled high with freshly cut sugarcane. The bikes buzz through thick dust past knots of traffic, dodging the heavy trucks that dominate the roads during the spring and summer harvest season. The long, spindly stalks of cane are chained together into thousand-pound bundles that bounce, as if in slow motion, precariously on the backs of the open-bed lorries.
Great plantations and networks of smallholder plots advance across Guairá’s lowlands and inch up its lush hillsides. Peasant farmers have cultivated the area for generations, living mostly off the abundance of food that sprouts from the region’s productive soils, and selling modest yields of sugarcane for income. Increasingly, smallholders and large plantations alike are growing organic to meet booming demand for natural foods from big organic processors and retailers in the West.
Paraguay is an epicenter of organic sugar production and exemplifies how the globally grown, ever more corporate organic food system works. The country is among the leading organic sugar producers and exporters in the world, sending most of its granules to the United States and Europe. Paraguay’s top organic sugar makers include a company called Azucarera Paraguaya (AZPA), which, according to its importer, provides a third of all organic sugar consumed in the United States. AZPA’s crystals course through the American food system, selling in stores such as Whole Foods under the brand name Wholesome Sweeteners, the Paraguayan firm’s Sugarland, Texas–based importer, which is a subsidiary of Imperial Sugar, the largest sugar company in the United States. AZPA’s sugar is also used by top processors including General Mills for its Cascadian Farm and Muir Glen products, and Dean Foods, the biggest dairy concern in the United States, in its Silk soymilk goods. Even in the era of healthy eating, the fraught and mysterious commodity of sugar continues to play a major role; as producers and retailers take organic mainstream, they are remaking natural food as processed, packaged, and sugar-rich.
Runaway sales of organic in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe and double-digit overall growth rates for the industry marked the 1990s and much of the first decade of the 2000s. Although consumption of all-natural goods has slowed somewhat due to the economic recession, the sector nevertheless continues its ongoing expansion. As a result, regional farms, even big ones, are not always able to keep pace, leaving existing local and national supplies stretched thin. In 2004, organic milk producer Organic Valley ended its lucrative deal with Wal-Mart because the dairy couldn’t turn out enough product. Unable to find sufficient alternatives nearby and year-round, processors and retailers are going farther—sometimes very far—afield. Consequently, food from around the world is appearing in supermarkets stamped with the word organic, a moniker that doesn’t reveal all the resources required to get that chemical-free morsel to the grocery aisle.
The notion of “food miles”—the distance an item travels to make it to the consumer—became a hot issue in the early 2000s. A debate flared in the United States and the UK about what made more sense, buying locally produced organic that was raised in energy-sucking greenhouses, or organic imports from warmer climates. Were the fossil fuels used to keep the vegetables and fruits from freezing contributing more to global warming than those used to transport them from overseas? The UK’s Soil Association, the country’s top organic-certification entity, considered pulling its seal for imported products. After conducting a study into the matter, however, the organization decided on a compromise. As of 2009 it began extending organic certification to airfreighted food that also meets ethical trade standards. The Soil Association reasoned that not buying organic crops from developing countries would inadvertently punish small farmers who’ve become reliant on the income.
While the discussion of food miles has died down somewhat in the United States, it has only deepened in the UK. British processors and retailers are beginning to focus on the overall carbon footprint of food (and other goods)—not just emissions from transport, but also those created from farming, storing, and packaging, and even from consumer trips to the store. To address this the UK-based Carbon Trust, a government-established independent company, created the Carbon Reduction Label, which divulges the total greenhouse gases embodied in an item, from every stage of production and disposal. Participants in the program include PepsiCo, Heinz, Kellogg’s, Coca-Cola, Cadbury, and the major British supermarket chain Tesco. Versions of the Carbon Reduction Label are being adopted across Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Disclosing CO2 releases, coupled with official organic certification, which, in some countries such as the UK, includes the Fair Trade component, sounds like a foolproof system.
Nevertheless, thorough as they may seem, these metrics can fail to capture the realities of how organic crops are grown in distant lands. Even as supermarkets brim with produce from such places as China, Chile, and Paraguay stamped with seals pledging higher standards, questions inevitably persist: What are the realities of unconventional farming in developing countries with notoriously exploitative labor practices and where environmental controls are often insufficient and go unchecked? How holistic can “certified organic” on a global scale truly be?
The spread of organic cultivation internationally is not always as beneficial as it might sound; in daily dealings, the reality of organic can diverge from its ideal in ways that are difficult to see from a distance. To understand these issues more fully, I traveled to South America in the fall of 2007 and, at an organic food conference, met a representative from Wholesome Sweeteners. I subsequently visited AZPA’s plantation, and some of the peasant farmers who supply the company. There, I found a system riddled with inconsistencies, loose interpretations of established organic rules, and what seems to be outright fraud. Such transgressions are facilitated in part by surprisingly inadequate official organic standards. While ignoring and breaking regulations can and does happen in the United States and Europe, when an operation is, say, in a remote, impoverished country in an unmapped rural area and run by a powerful company, checks and balances can more easily fall away.
TEBICUARY
AZPA’s mill and sprawling plantation are situated in the state of Guairá, about three hours’ drive east of the country’s capital, Asunción. AZPA was started a century ago by a partnership of families, “pioneers” according to the company’s website, “who planted a dream in Paraguay’s wilderness.” I’ve come here by way of Dario Zaldivar, who is Wholesome Sweeteners’ point man in Paraguay. Zaldivar deals exclusively with AZPA, which supplies much of Wholesome’s product. AZPA’s compound on the banks of the Tebicuary River is a classic setup: an orderly, tree-lined entrance leading to narrow streets of whitewashed worker housing, a school, church, health clinic, commissary, hotel for official guests, the house of the owners, and, of course, the mill. The buildings and grounds are meticulously maintained, an outpost of civility in the undeveloped countryside. The company’s ever-expanding crew of workers—Zaldivar says it’s now at about seven hundred full-time and half as many seasonal—has erected, just across the Tebicuary, a shantytown that looks like a movie-set version of itself. Zaldivar calls it “the Wild West.”
In addition to organic, AZPA makes ethanol and conventional sugar—one of its biggest Paraguayan customers is Coca-Cola. Since organic is the most profitable of AZPA’s products, the company is rapidly expanding its operations to increase output. In 2007, the firm tripled the mill’s sugarcane grinding capacity from five thousand to fifteen thousand metric tons per day. AZPA’s organic acreage is also on the rise. I’m told that the sugar maker isn’t converting any of its conventional land, but is instead establishing new organic fields.
Rubén Darío Ayala oversees AZPA’s agricultural land as the company’s head of crop care. I first meet him when he arrives on the small, rain-soaked, unpaved road where the car I’m riding in is lodged deep in the mud. My guide, after several fruitless attempts at extracting the vehicle himself, finally places a cell-phone call for help. He dials AZPA. They quickly dispatch Ayala with three others in a company-issued 4x4, a technology few here can afford. Ayala has a solid build, and a baggy, suntanned face, and looks completely at ease as he and the others go about the messy job of extricating our car. Several people had stopped to offer help before Ayala’s crew arrived. My guide offhandedly declined, telling each of them that someone from AZPA was on the way. The company has a powerful presence in the region, and not just as an employer and buyer of cane. It helps maintain roads and funds area schools and medical clinics. Most people who live here, from the wealthy to the poor, have some connection to the company.
After our car is on solid ground, Ayala, who’s in his midthirties, drives us out to the company’s older organic fields in an area called Tebicuary. He tells me his responsibilities are increasing because the company has embarked on an expansion of its organic cropland; he has no formal training so he’s learning as he goes. Out the window I see pools of water that have collected after last night’s heavy downpour that now reflect a silvery blue sky. From the wet soil rise phosphorescent new shoots of three-month-old organic cane. The precise rows form lines that converge at a distant vanishing point somewhere on the horizon. We get out of the truck and stand amid thousands of acres of cane.
As is true with domestically raised organic crops, those grown outside the United States and the European Union must meet binding organic standards set by those governments and verified by a third party. To qualify a farm must abide by rules including bans on certain chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and fungicides, and it must avoid monocropping. Monocropping is a factory-farming method that entails transforming existing ecosystems or traditional farmland into large fields planted with the same crop year after year, a method designed to reduce costs. Organic methods are intended to counteract the deleterious effects of conventional industrial cultivation, which destroys biodiversity, wipes out soil health, contributes to erosion, and helps deplete groundwater due to increased runoff. The organic seal is meant to signal that a farm abides by nature-supporting practices, which are typically more expensive to implement. (With organic certification, farmers can not only advertise their more sustainable methods, but also charge higher prices to help recoup their costs.)
I ask if Ayala considers organic monoculture a contradiction. “I understand it’s a monocrop,” he says, but “because it’s a perennial, we can’t avoid doing monocropping.” He recounts a trial his team did a few years ago with just over six hundred acres of organic soy as a rotation. “It almost killed me. Lots of expenses, weeds took over, we had a drought that year, it didn’t grow, caterpillars and other bugs . . . we had a lot of problems.”
As its certifier AZPA employs California-based Quality Assurance International (QAI), established in 1989 and owned by NSF International, an American nongovernmental organization that develops public-health standards. QAI is a for-profit firm that is a major player in the global organic trade; its stamp of approval adorns the labels of two-thirds of all certified organic food on U.S. grocery store shelves. Ayala says QAI has issued minor warnings about AZPA’s monocropping, citing the need to maintain greater biodiversity. So, he explains, despite the earlier fiasco, currently his workers plant some fields with regenerative crops. When I ask how much land is currently under rotation, however, he says he’s not sure.
Even though AZPA is clearly failing to adequately cycle in various plants to repair its soil, not all crops need to be rotated at the same rate. Compared to other perennials, sugar is less taxing on the soil and less disease-prone. So in relative terms growing cane nonstop isn’t as destructive as growing more nutrient-hungry crops such as tobacco and bananas. But, according to Richard P. Tucker, a professor of natural resources at the University of Michigan, “Sustainability depends on far more than the biological potential of a single crop.” While it may fare well in the short run, over longer periods of time this stripping away of biological complexity has a more profound impact. Just because sugarcane is typically tougher against infestation and more forgiving to the soil doesn’t mean it’s immune from harm. This becomes apparent as soon as Ayala directs my attention to the plants in the field where we’re standing.
The head of crop care digs up one of the young organic cane plants by its roots. “Here, this is the mark of a driller,” he says as he points to a brown borehole in the base of the stalk. He cuts into the plant’s green and white flesh with his pocketknife searching for the culprit, but the pest has already moved on. Drillers are a serious problem because they suck the sweet liquid from the plant, leaving it unable to mature. Every stalk Ayala pulls up carries the telltale mark. The bugs also plague some of AZPA’s vast conventional fields, Ayala tells me. But he doesn’t bring up the connection between the pest infestation and monoculture farming, nor does he mention that unhealthy soil conditions created by single-crop farming also increase runoff that would otherwise recharge groundwater sources. This is a serious issue on AZPA’s plantation since it sits atop the massive Guaraní Aquifer, one of the biggest underground stores of freshwater in the world, and a major source of drinking water in South America.
An outsider might conclude that these results are at odds with official USDA National Organic Program (NOP) regulations, but the devil is in the details. The legal text that delineates NOP standards doesn’t explicitly ban monocropping—in fact the word is never mentioned. Further, the rule sheet uses the term biodiversity just once, in the definition of organic farming: “A production system that is managed in accordance with the Act and regulations in this [document] to respond to site-specific conditions by integrating cultural, biological, and mechanical practices that foster cycling of resources, promote ecological balance, and conserve biodiversity.” The text does call for crop rotation, which all organic farms must engage in—save for farms that cultivate perennials such as sugarcane. “Perennial cropping systems [must] employ means such as alley cropping, intercropping, and hedgerows to introduce biological diversity in lieu of crop rotation.” So, technically speaking, AZPA doesn’t have to tear up its sugarcane every year and plant soy or some other nitrogen-fixing legume. But the company is required to grow other types of crops amid the cane. While AZPA might employ these practices, Ayala never says so, and I don’t see such efforts at biodiversity in the organic fields I visit.
QAI seems more forgiving of the sugar maker, however. Each year the certifier dispatches a freelance inspector to AZPA; for the past several years they’ve sent Luis Brenes from Costa Rica. When we talk over the phone, Brenes won’t speak specifically about AZPA, but claims that NOP standards on biodiversity are too vague for a certifier such as QAI to impose restrictions on farms that monocrop. “If you have a requirement that is not concrete enough to be measured or in some way evaluated, you cannot audit it,” Brenes asserts. “And that’s something that happens with biodiversity.”
“That sounds like a bit of a cop-out to me,” says Jim Riddle, former chair of the National Organic Standards Board, the body that wrote and administers NOP regulations. As Riddle explains, while the language in the official code doesn’t itemize specifics for every bioregion, organic inspectors aren’t meant to use any lack of detail as a loophole, adding, “There are some certifiers that are much more attuned to biodiversity, and QAI is not one of them.”
Adhering to more straightforward NOP organic rules, AZPA plows without turning the soil, weeds by hand, and forgoes chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides (for example, Ayala and his crew are releasing wasps to try to drive out the drillers). But as a soil amendment AZPA relies heavily on chicken manure from industrial poultry farms—the type that administers antibiotics and uses feed laced with arsenic to speed growth (not to mention breeding birds to bulk up so quickly their legs snap beneath the weight, and packing the animals tightly into indoor pens). Again, counter to common sense, this practice is entirely acceptable under the current law. NOP regs make no distinction between manure from an organic animal farm and that from a chemically reliant industrial operation. Further, although substances including arsenic are banned from organic production, the way NOP rules are currently interpreted, manure from animals fed such substances doesn’t have to be treated before being applied to organic fields.
On the afternoon Zaldivar drives me through AZPA’s plantation, we pass a storage area piled with grayish mounds of chicken dung. A suffocating ammonia odor infiltrates the car. “What kind of organic farm can this really be if it relies on chicken manure generated by a factory farm?” he snipes. He rails against the inadequate certification system that allows an organic operation to be dependent on an environmentally unsustainable, polluting enterprise. At another point Zaldivar tells me, “Organic is becoming exactly the same as conventional. The revolution organic once was doesn’t exist anymore, it’s gone.” While observations such as this could be construed as hypocritical, they’re not entirely uncommon in the corporate organic trade. Among the industry’s key players are people with a background in progressive politics and environmentalism. I imagine this is what predisposes Zaldivar to admit that organic hasn’t turned out the way he once thought it could.
Zaldivar is a former militant leftist and founding member of Paraguay’s Workers Party. In his late forties, he’s got a compact build, keeps his thinning hair buzzed short, and persistently tries to conceal his chronic edginess. Zaldivar tells me he started protesting the military dictatorship of Stroessner when he was a university student in the 1970s. But when police brutally killed some of his comrades, and Stroessner retained power despite the resistance, Zaldivar called it quits. “I don’t do politics anymore,” he says. “I decided to get a job instead.” Zaldivar calculated that if he tried to save society, he could pay a dear price, but if he tried to save himself, he could prosper. And that’s what’s happened. He is now among the upper class who live in gated compounds and drive imported cars. I ask why he continues to work with companies such as Wholesome Sweeteners and General Mills if he doesn’t believe in what they produce. “Because of the money,” he replies. “In organic you can make a lot of money.”
ISLA ALTA
Rubén Ayala didn’t take me to where many of AZPA’s newer organic fields are located, in an area called Isla Alta, in the state of Paraguarí, which borders Guairá to the west. AZPA’s unconventional cropland traces the silhouette of the Ybytymi, a low string of hills that surround a river studded with a series of dramatic waterfalls. On the ridges above the falls gnarled succulents intertwine with mango trees, and the bulbous tops of spindly palms glimmer in the scorching sun. Sparse grasses and the red flames of flowering ginger plants dot the ground as Brazilian walnut trees—some can reach as high as one hundred feet—elegantly stretch skyward. A portion of the Ybytymi range is protected from development, having been granted national park status by the federal government several years ago. But AZPA’s land is just beyond the geographical reach of the restrictions. The longtime environmental secretary for the state of Paraguarí, Flor Fretes, helped in a recent effort to extend the boundary of the park, but it failed.
Zaldivar drives me through the plantation at Isla Alta, which is just a short distance from Salto Cristal, one of the area’s unprotected waterfalls. Across these hillsides span thousands of acres of both conventional and organic fields. This year’s organic cane has already been harvested, but workers are still bringing in the nonorganic crops. In one field, men and machines cut and load; the heat and dust persist as ceaselessly as the desolate drone of the engines. The organic acreage is bordered by forest and pasture, which is dotted with white cows that graze under a cloudless sky heavy with humidity.
Irritable again, Zaldivar shoves his hand toward the windshield and points at the fields. He tells me he’s witnessed the number of trees dwindle dramatically, “mostly in the last five years, that’s when you can really see it. That’s when demand for organic really picked up.” Along many stretches I can see that the thick tangle of forest abruptly halts at the tidy edge of AZPA’s fields. Although the company grows some conventional cane out here, this is the designated area where AZPA is expanding its organic acreage; it stands to reason that the forest in Isla Alta is being taken out for organic. As we’re leaving, we come to a spot where two dirt roads intersect. At three corners sugarcane bristles up from the earth; the fourth is still dense with trees. “Totally new,” Zaldivar says, pointing to the cropland.
I return to Isla Alta a few days later with Flor Fretes, and she brings her husband, Avelino Vega, who is a local lawmaker and farm extension worker. They grew up in the area, know the terrain well, and are both members of the right-wing Colorado Party. The conversation quickly turns to the clearing of trees. “Ten years ago there were no roads, it was totally forested. I’ve watched it change, everyone around here has,” Vega says. Fretes agrees, adding, “It’s very difficult to fight against. . . . Because AZPA’s a big business in the area, everything is just forgotten.”
As we drive the anonymous dirt roads that delineate AZPA’s fields, Vega brings up another impact of the company’s enterprise. Small farmers in the area used to grow a wide range of food and cash crops, such as pineapple, within the existing forest. But now, with the promise of higher incomes from organic, they have a major incentive to switch to sugarcane. The result is an overall homogenization of what used to be a far more diverse ecological gene pool, not to mention the loss of knowledge on how to raise a variety of edible plants without felling trees.
It’s challenging to figure out exactly what is happening on AZPA’s land. Rubén Ayala tells me the farm is fifteen thousand acres. An article from a Paraguayan government website says that AZPA cultivates twenty-seven thousand acres of a farm that spans a total of fifty thousand acres. And Raúl Hoeckle, then president of AZPA, tells me they have twenty-five thousand acres in cultivation but won’t say how much additional land the company owns.
Hoeckle is about a year away from retiring and expects his son to come on at AZPA sometime soon. Before the senior Hoeckle assumed his post at the firm, he worked in the plastics industry doing manufacturing and trading, and for a company that sold snack foods from Arcor, a large Argentinean corporation that makes cookies, candy, and crackers. When I ask about the deforestation in Isla Alta, Hoeckle gets cross. “Why did you ask? We don’t do it anywhere. The organic law doesn’t permit any of the planters to deforest. We don’t do it!”
Over the phone from his office in Asunción he goes on, in a still agitated tone, to explain that as a child he used to go to Isla Alta all the time because his family raised cattle there. The Hoeckle clan sold their land and later bought it back, and he says, when they did, trees had been cleared. “I can tell you that the owner from whom we bought it . . . they cut down trees before they sold it to us to make money from timber. But they did that, not AZPA.” Hoeckle, who also serves at the Network on Investment and Export, a division of the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, wavers back and forth between asserting that the land has always been without trees and conceding that parts of the forest have been felled. “I can’t tell you who cut trees before, but when we sell or buy, our responsibility starts when we buy the land. Only then is it important that we don’t make something against nature—and we don’t do it!”
Fretes tells me it’s hard to believe AZPA didn’t deforest the area. “Who else would?” she asks. “Even if it’s not them doing it directly, even if it’s other companies or small farmers, AZPA knows the land is cleared for them to grow sugarcane. Either way, AZPA is ultimately responsible.” While AZPA itself may not clear land at Isla Alta, according to the people I talked to, forest that once stood is now gone and has been replaced at least in part by the company’s organic crops.
Clearing trees, or transforming any native biome, to create cropland undeniably wrecks diverse ecosystems, yet NOP standards don’t ban it. The official document outlining the rules never even addresses the practice. “This is the problem of how the farmers interpret the rules,” explains Salvador Garibay, a researcher at the Swiss-based Research Institute for Organic Agriculture, who works extensively with organic growers in Latin America. “If the farmers and certifying agencies and buyers take into account biodiversity then this wouldn’t happen.” Laura Raynolds, codirector of the Center for Fair and Alternative Trade at Colorado State University, frames the issue in terms of the market. “What incentive do organic producers have to not clear land? If they are involved in commercial organic circuits, where price premiums for producers are often quite low, they are caught in the same market dynamics as conventional producers and many may disregard rules that are not enforced.” If powerful farms and certifiers can bend and interpret the standards to get away with avoiding more expensive organic methods, then why wouldn’t they?
Although official NOP certification rules do not forbid the destruction of native environments, QAI is also supposed to inspect AZPA’s organic fields according to International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements guidelines, a set of global rules that prohibit “opportunistic ecosystem removal.” However, due to AZPA’s obfuscation, when QAI asks how the land was previously used, the company can simply say it sat fallow, was cattle pasture, or has been shifted from conventional production. Since apparently no inspectors have sought to confirm this, AZPA need not mention deforestation at all, and QAI can continue rubber-stamping AZPA’s organic seal. When I ask QAI about the situation at AZPA, its general manager, Jaclyn Bowen, says the company “has been an advocate for the organic industry and the biodiversity, improved soil quality, and water quality that it represents.”
ITURBE
The Asociación Agrícola Cañera del Sur (Agricultural Association of Southern Cane Growers) is a half-century-old farmers’ cooperative headquartered in Iturbe, a dusty town several kilometers down the Tebicuary River from AZPA. Each year AZPA augments its supply of cane by purchasing the harvest of local smallholder farmers. I’ve come here to meet some of the growers who supply the sugar maker. We sit in the Cañera del Sur office with the windows open; a ceiling fan whirs overhead, and a few of us pass a cup of cold yerba maté, a traditional tea. Francisco Ferriera, president of Cañera del Sur, says the co-op has 220 members, most of whom grow sugarcane on farms that vary in size but can be as small as two and a half acres. Wholesome Sweeteners has been working with Cañera del Sur for the last five years, brokering their deal with AZPA, and helping them get both organic and Fair Trade certification.
Cañera del Sur farmers earn their organic status as part of what’s called “group certification,” which is permitted by both the USDA National Organic Program and the European Union’s organic EU-Eco Regulation. The idea behind group certification—praised by many who promote small-scale organic agriculture in developing countries, and criticized by those who believe it can’t guarantee all growers employ organic methods—is that it allows larger numbers of family farmers to earn the organic seal while minimizing costs. Under this setup, a group of farmers pool their money to pay the certifier, a fraction of the farms are physically inspected, and if they’re approved, all the group members get the seal.
In the case of Cañera del Sur, AZPA—not the farmers themselves—organizes the group and pays for certification. (This is a common arrangement in developing countries with impoverished farmers seeking verification seals.) That means the organic distinction doesn’t belong to the farmers, but instead is the property of AZPA. Consequently, Cañera del Sur members can’t vend their produce as organic on their own. If the campesinos want to get the price premium, they are obliged to sell to AZPA. According to Zaldivar and Francisco Ferriera, if the small growers had to carry this fee, it would be their single largest fixed cost. On their own—without AZPA picking up the tab, and without group certification—most of these small farmers could never afford to get certified organic.
As for Cañera del Sur’s Fair Trade certification, Wholesome Sweeteners foots the bill, again because it’s too costly for the growers to fund themselves. As is true with organic, Fair Trade, or FT, is accredited by a third-party organization, which then grants the producer the right to stamp the official seal on its product packaging; for goods sold in the United States this label is issued exclusively by the nonprofit certifier TransFair U.S.A.; it is a black-and-white graphic of a person holding a bowl in each hand. FT-certified goods cost more for Western consumers because the items are grown using sound environmental practices, and, most centrally, because small farmers garner a higher—“fair”—price for their produce. The idea is to boost the income and therefore standard of living of peasant growers such as those in rural Paraguay. Zaldivar tells me that in the case of Cañera del Sur, FT status increases their earnings by about a third.
Wholesome lets the farmers keep the entire FT premium without requiring any repayment of the certification fees. I ask why his company doesn’t try to recover the thousand or more dollars a year it spends to renew Cañera del Sur’s license. “First, it’s good marketing for Wholesome, it makes us look good,” Zaldivar says. “Second, last year the market for Fair Trade in the U.S. grew by thirty-seven percent—that’s a lot more than the organic market.” In other words, the FT logo on Wholesome’s packaging is good PR and gives the company greater access to the burgeoning mass of socially conscious shoppers. Since Wholesome pays to maintain Cañera del Sur’s FT certification, however, the license belongs to the trader and not the campesinos. As with their organic-certification deal, the small farmers can’t sell cane as Fair Trade to anybody but AZPA, which in turn sells that sugar only to Wholesome.
A Cañera del Sur member whom I will call Eber Ibarra is thirty-five years old and has been farming since he was a child. His parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were farmers; as far back as he knows, his family has worked the land in Guairá. His fields are some distance from where he, his wife, and their two young daughters now live. They moved from their old house near their acreage because the road was too rough. About twenty kilometers from the nearest town, their current home is still remote but more accessible; for most of the year, the unpredictable dirt roads are navigable on the cheap motorcycle the family recently bought on an installment plan.
Out here the landscape is cloaked in rich grasses and trees, and the soil is either bright red or ocher; in every direction giant termite mounds rise like earthen stalagmites. In the distance round hills rise abruptly from the flat earth. Ibarra’s small, weathered house is washed in chipping blue paint, has a rudimentary kitchen, one bedroom, and a storage room, no bathroom, and no running water. The family spends most of its time out of doors, which can get difficult in the peak of summer. We sit outside under a tree in the molded-plastic lawn chairs now ubiquitous the world over. During the time that we talk, we all periodically adjust our seats seeking shade to block the sapping, extreme gaze of the sun. Chickens and ducks flap and squawk in the dirt yard near a white horse that’s tied to a tree.
Ibarra grows five acres of sugarcane on his farm. His annual crop of cane generally earns him just under $3,000 per year. Out of that he must pay workers to help harvest. He can’t do it alone; when it’s time to bring in the cane, it must be done quickly. When the mill issues the word that it’s accepting tonnage, small producers such as Ibarra must get theirs in before other growers do, lest the company stops buying. The rapid pace is also due to the need for income; by the time harvest rolls around, most growers have earned little if any money for a full year. Out of his pay, Ibarra also has to cover the cost of transporting his stalks to AZPA’s gate.
This year the harvest was difficult. After dealing with cut cane languishing on the ground uncollected for weeks, Ibarra finally got it delivered to the mill and got paid. But once he subtracted his costs for labor and hauling, he ended up well below the Paraguayan minimum wage. So, as often happens, the family will have to rely on the income of his wife, who works at the local health clinic. There she earns less than the national minimum of about $265 per month; but that, along with their subsistence crops, is what keeps the family of four fed, clothed, and able to make the payments on their motorbike. She tells me the health clinic has no medicine, and almost no supplies, so area residents most often end up relying on traditional cures using roots and herbs.
Ibarra’s good friend, neighbor, and fellow Cañera del Sur member, whom I will refer to as Luis Gonzalez, has also had a rough season. Early on, Cañera del Sur encountered troubles with transport. The co-op had a contract with a hauling company called El Corre Caminos, which belongs to one of the owners of AZPA. (Cañera del Sur owns three trucks, which Wholesome helped it buy, but these are not enough for its more than two hundred members.) According to the farmers, El Corre said it could handle eight loads a day, but sometimes collected just two loads all week. Because of this Gonzalez was hesitant to cut—if the stalks sit too long they lose their juice and with it their value. Being cautious, he waited until he knew there would be a truck, but none ever came. Out of his twenty-five acres Gonzalez cut only seven; most of the stalks still lie scattered in the field. “I feel like I’ve been ripped off,” he says, exasperated. And he wasn’t alone, according to Francisco Ferriera of Cañera del Sur, about 70 percent of its members couldn’t deliver their cane this season.
Gonzalez wasn’t able to harvest last year either because of a shortage of field workers. This type of low-paying, hard, manual labor is failing to attract a new generation. If cane goes uncut for more than two years, it is virtually worthless; farmers might try to sell it to another mill as conventional or offer it at a pittance as cattle feed to one of the area’s ranches. Gonzalez doesn’t sell any other crops; everything else he raises, including a few cows and chickens, is for subsistence. His wife works the farm so when they don’t move their cane, neither have an income. In years when there is little or no revenue from sugarcane, Gonzalez, his wife, and their daughter survive on money he earns as a laborer on a nearby estancia owned by a powerful senator.
When I ask Ibarra and Gonzalez why the collection trucks didn’t come, they say it’s because AZPA grows a lot itself, an increasing amount of which is organic. “I think this happened because AZPA has too much sugarcane to harvest,” Gonzalez assesses. “We are basically competing with them now.” Ibarra agrees, “AZPA is growing more organic than in the past, and they give priority to their own fields.” To remedy this, Ibarra and Gonzalez tell me the co-op wants to start its own mill, where they figure they would earn 60 percent more money. And, Ibarra says, their daughters could become managers there. But when I mention this to Zaldivar, he is skeptical: “AZPA would drop them for another co-op and they would lose what they’ve got.” He adds that AZPA intends to start its own Fair Trade co-op “with farmers it can control.”
Even though Ibarra and Gonzalez are registered organic and Fair Trade, it’s no guarantee they’ll make a living wage. If the company’s harvest was sufficient or they procure it from other growers, these campesinos won’t take home the income that certification promises. According to the international body that oversees FT, the Fairtrade Labelling Organization, farmers on its rolls sell no more than 20 percent of their crops at the premium price. The rest either rots in the field or is off-loaded at far lower conventional rates. Regardless, AZPA and Wholesome get to stamp their quota of packages with the seals. This is obviously not what consumers have in mind when they purchase organic and Fair Trade items. Part of what’s made Fair Trade so popular in the Global North is the notion that it will help small farmers such as Ibarra and Gonzalez earn more to improve their quality of life. In this case, however, Fair Trade status binds these growers to a single processor and trader because the cost of certification is so high. Despite how it may look from afar, the system meant to ensure ethical standards and ecological well-being can deal small farmers out from the start.
Something else Western consumers might find surprising is that although Gonzalez has been certified organic for over ten years, his farm has never been visited by an organic inspector. The cane he grows carries the seal of QAI, which has also never sent anyone to Ibarra’s farm (although he was once visited by the Swiss body Institute for Marketecology, which certifies for the European market). Instead, as is allowed under NOP rules, AZPA performs the inspections itself. That means when QAI’s man shows up for annual assessments, he first reviews AZPA’s in-house records on its suppliers. Then the inspector randomly selects a group of farms to make the trek to. The proportion of farms he visits isn’t something laid out in official organic rules, however; it’s entirely at the discretion of the certification body. The more farms the inspector checks up on, the more money it costs the certifier. This can, of course, create the temptation to keep the number of visits low. One thing external inspectors might not see is that some of these farmers fail to rotate crops. Because sugarcane is a perennial and the area has rich clay-based soil, the campesinos can and do leave the roots in the ground as long as they continue to produce; these peasants can’t afford to lose the income from planting a different crop to revitalize the soil. In his field Gonzalez has grown cane from the same roots for thirteen continuous years. He says he’s not concerned about pests and infertility from monocropping because it hasn’t been a problem yet.
Regardless of whether organic certifiers review the paperwork and walk the fields of each small farm, the reality is that cultivators such as Ibarra and Gonzalez will most likely grow without chemicals because that’s what they know and can afford. Chances are low that they’ll cheat by using pesticides or synthetic fertilizers, even if they don’t rotate crops or maintain good diversity in their fields. But, by not visiting the farms of each grower, and relying on AZPA’s audits, certifiers can miss other damaging practices.
YBYTYRUZÚ
Paraguay is comprised of two main ecosystems. In the country’s north and west is the less populated, more arid Great Chaco Forest, which reaches over the Argentinean border. Stretching across all of eastern Paraguay and into both Argentina and Brazil is the Atlantic Forest. This region used to be blanketed in trees, but now what remains is a devastated biome, fragments of flora and fauna cut off by cropland and cattle pasture. Today over 90 percent of the native forest has been felled, rendering the area, according to environmental researchers, “arguably the most devastated and most highly threatened ecosystem on the planet.”
Driving to the top of Acati, the second-tallest point in the Ybytyruzú chain of hills, not far from AZPA’s Tebicuary mill, I come across a newly cleared field. Jagged trunks mark what used to be standing; their stubble looks awkward amid the previously sheltered dirt and grass that’s now exposed. A curtain of intact trees hangs behind the freshly cleared two acres of land. Much of the Ybytyruzú area is protected by a federal law that designates it a Managed Resource Reserve, meaning that trees can be cut but only with a permit. Campesino farmers are sprinkled throughout the Ybytyruzú, their croplands creeping up into some of the last remaining clusters of native forest in eastern Paraguay.
Mariano Martinez is in charge of making sure the reserve does not further disappear at the hands of loggers, farmers, and fires. In his late thirties, Martinez has been working as the lone Ybytyruzú park guard for about fifteen years. The reserve is sixty thousand acres, all of which lies on unpaved roads, many rough and steep. Even though the government created the reserve, it hasn’t allocated Martinez the tools to do his job; he’s been given no vehicle, no telephone, no office, no computer, and no fire-prevention equipment. When we go to survey the cleared land, to look official he adorns himself with a khaki vest, a canvas hat, a pair of binoculars, and a tote bag from an environmental conference he once attended.
“This land is owned by Luis de Jesus Escobar,” Martinez states as we stand on the road facing the deforested patch. The park guard assesses that Escobar, a campesino farmer (whose name I have changed), has cut the trees so he can cultivate sugarcane. “No question, the size of the area and its location just next to the road, this will definitely be used to grow cane,” Martinez says. Along the road lies field after field of sugarcane. I ask if we can talk to Escobar about the deforested area, and with a wince Martinez shakes his head no. “I don’t want to go talk to him. It could turn violent,” he says. “Besides, the bad thing is already done.”
Almost everyone around here has a .38, Martinez tells me as he pulls back his vest to reveal a handgun (which he has borrowed from another government agency because the reserve did not provide one). “I’ve never used my gun, but people have pulled guns on me many times,” he says. On one such occasion he was walking around the reserve and a man he suspected of clearing trees put a rifle to his chest and told him to leave. Martinez recounts another incident when he was home with his wife and three kids and a car drove by firing twice into the air and once at the house. The bullet hit a wall and no one was hurt. The shooters were never found. “There are many interests: there’s the political, money, business interests—those are the people who are really dangerous,” Martinez explains. “The demand for organic sugar in the U.S. and Europe is a big pressure on the forests here.”
Escobar’s land, it turns out, is not in the reserve Martinez monitors, although it lies in the middle of the Ybytyruzú chain. Even still, looking across a steep, narrow valley directly into the reserve, deforestation is obvious to the naked eye. “We have to grant the people who live here the right to support themselves off the land,” Martinez explains. “As their families get bigger, they are not leaving, so they clear more and more land to grow crops to earn a living.” Martinez says that although residents in and outside the reserve are required to get permits to cut, the majority of farmers ignore this rule. And, despite the supposed success of the 2004 Zero Deforestation Law, enforcement mechanisms around here are essentially nonexistent, so the clearing persists.
According to Martinez many of the farmers in and around the reserve are certified organic, and it’s likely that Escobar will seek, and win, the official seal. While deforestation is nothing new to the region—most of the forest was taken out well before official organic arrived—the price premium for organic is driving cultivators to clear more land. “When we started, we thought certifying these small farmers was a good idea, that it would form a sort of greenbelt around the Ybytyruzú chain,” Zaldivar tells me. “But instead the farmers now have incentive to go into the forest and clear it away to grow organic cane.”
THE POWER OF ORGANIC
The laws enacted in both the United States and EU requiring organic food and farming to meet certain standards, among other outcomes, have contributed to a streamlining of commerce, greatly easing national and international trade in organics. Since U.S. regulations apply equally in all fifty states, a producer in, say, Paraguay has to meet just one set of guidelines to sell its goods throughout the entire country. Before the American standards were fully implemented in 2002, different states and various certification companies followed an array of directives in a piecemeal system. This made it exceedingly complex for a firm such as AZPA to crack the rich and voracious U.S. market. The EU’s rules, which originated in the early 1990s, have also helped its organic sector become more cohesive, albeit less so than in the United States. Because these are the most developed organic markets globally, their guidelines serve as de facto international organic rules.
Although U.S. and EU laws say organic food must be regulated, how those standards are upheld is another issue. Under the American system, the government isn’t directly tasked with day-to-day enforcement. Instead, it issues licenses to private certification companies for the job. Government officials can intervene when there’s a serious problem, but, otherwise, the certification firms call the shots. QAI’s Jaclyn Bowen refuses to answer any questions about what’s happening on AZPA’s land when I inquire. She does say that as of May 2009 (a year and a half after my visit to Paraguay) QAI is no longer AZPA’s certifier, but she won’t say why. It serves the interests of organic certification firms to keep a lid on the situation. If QAI, or whoever goes on to certify AZPA, raises questions about, say, deforestation at Isla Alta, or deems AZPA unworthy of organic status because of monocropping, the company runs the risk of losing a valuable customer. According to Zaldivar and Ferriera, the leader of Cañera del Sur, during the seven years it was certified by QAI, AZPA spent about $25,000 annually renewing its organic certification.
While it’s unclear whether QAI was aware of possible noncompliance at AZPA, the company has been known to protect powerful clients in the past. The most prominent case involves Aurora Organic Dairy, one of the largest such operations in the United States. Aurora is owned and operated by the founders of Horizon Organic Dairy (now held by Dean Foods, the leading dairy producer in America), and its milk is sold in cartons bearing the in-store labels of Target, Wal-Mart, Safeway, and other major chains. These retailers typically sell their milk at a lower price than the brand-name organic stuff. In 2007 a USDA investigation identified over a dozen “willful violations” of organic provisions by Aurora, which owns large-scale farms in Colorado and Texas, and a dairy processing center in Colorado. According to the investigation, Aurora was running its dairies more like industrial feedlots, not letting its cows sufficiently graze on pasture, integrating conventionally managed animals into its organic herds, and keeping inadequate records of its activities and transactions. The Cornucopia Institute, a Wisconsin-based watchdog group that filed the initial complaint against Aurora with the USDA, reported that the dairy company’s violations were so overt it’s implausible that QAI could have missed them.
Throughout the investigation, the certifier stood by its client, and in the aftermath of the USDA judgment, QAI spoke in Aurora’s defense. Ultimately, Aurora signed a consent agreement with the USDA admitting no wrongdoing while accepting a probationary period during which it would address the issues raised in the investigation. QAI, however, has suffered no disciplinary action for its handling of the dairy’s certification.
Joe Smillie, vice president of QAI—and a current member of the National Organic Standards Board—recently told a reporter, “People are really hung up on regulations . . . I say, ‘Let’s find a way to bend that one, because it’s not important.’ . . . What are we selling? Are we selling health food? No. Consumers, they expect organic food to be growing in a greenhouse on Pluto. Hello? We live in a polluted world. It isn’t pure. We are doing the best we can.”
By no means do all organic farmers and processors flout the rules. A number of organic proponents I talk to stress this point. But even when certified producers do the right thing, the guidelines and enforcement are seriously flawed. Peter LeCompte, the organic-sourcing manager for General Mills, which owns Muir Glen and Cascadian Farm under its Small Planet subsidiary, is one of the biggest buyers of organic in the world, and he’s a major customer of Azucarera Paraguaya’s. When I interview him, he says he can’t comment on land use or farming practices at AZPA. But LeCompte agrees that the current certification system is susceptible to fraud. “Sure,” he says. “If somebody wants to cheat and they’re smart, they can get away with it.” No doubt many in the organic industry would prefer if the public remained oblivious to this. As it stands, organic rules can be manipulated without sacrificing the price premium—which can be 10, 30, 50 percent or more above the cost of conventional food—because, as LeCompte puts it, “people’s faith in organic is often not founded in knowledge.” The General Mills executive isn’t alone in this assessment. Bruno Fischer, director of international procurement for another large organic conglomerate, Hain Celestial, sees the matter similarly. “Most consumers are simple minds,” he imparts to the audience at an organic trade show I attend. “Simple minds will look at the label and nothing else.”
From grocery store aisles the competing interests and layers of interrelations are impossible to see. Small farmers can be registered Fair Trade and organic and still not earn a living wage because they’re bound to a single buyer. If that deal falls through for any reason, the campesinos lose. The organic label on a bottle of ketchup signals to the green shopper that its ingredients—including the sugar—weren’t harvested from monocultures raised on land where native forest used to stand, even if that’s not true. It’s difficult to read these complex realities through the postage-stamp-size emblems that promise biodiversity, socially just conditions, and the abandoning of toxic chemicals. Many Westerners believe organic marks a return to a cycle more aligned with the workings of nature. But what official organic really means in such places as the eastern forests of Paraguay is not so straightforward.
After a long day in AZPA’s mill and rambling plantation, Zaldivar tells me there’s no guarantee Wholesome and AZPA will keep their prominent place in the organic sugar business. Some producer in some other country might come in at a lower price and “it could all be gone, in one day, just like that.” The short term is the enduring quality in Paraguay, and not just in the organic trade. “I can’t think of the future, I can’t take it for granted,” Zaldivar says. “All that is certain is uncertainty, and you just learn to live with that.”
A few nights later I have a final meeting with Zaldivar at an expensive restaurant. The waiter is dressed as a gaucho and serves us grilled chicken hearts and fresh steak. Our table is on a covered patio, and a group of unwashed, rag-clothed children pass by in a horse-drawn cart filled with garbage. Zaldivar is unmoved. As our conversation goes on, it becomes clear that he’s grown ambivalent about what he told me in previous days. Tonight he says he believes Big Organic can correct the looming environmental crisis. He now claims the system will save itself—pursuing social change to create ecological stability, he says, is just too dangerous. Then his cell phone rings. His oldest son, who’s twenty, has been kidnapped. He slaps his phone shut and dashes to his car. I watch the red taillights trail off down the road.
On the way back to my hotel I’m suddenly more aware of the neighborhood. My eyes are drawn to a house with the kind of lights that would be used to illuminate a football field; four squares of intense white, silently streaked by bugs that momentarily reflect the electric glare. Stationed atop tall posts, maybe thirty feet up, the lights point down into the backyard. The whole place is concealed by sheer, mute walls. Many homes in the upscale district look something like this, the physical demonstration of efforts to wipe out the unknown: the risk of strangers walking up, the chance that someone might be taken, shot at, killed.
The uncertainty in a place like Paraguay, for rich and poor, is so palpable it can begin to seem like a natural aspect of life; the presence of it changes in the way the heat changes throughout the day. The early-morning coolness lingers in the shade, near trees and bushes, and gently gives way to midday rays. But before long the sun grows stifling, there is nothing merciful about it. It singes the skin. The warmth it offered just a few hours before is now transformed into a force that’s unbearable. Then with nightfall, the heat recedes as if to rest. But it is replaced by darkness, hence the floodlights.
