that favors the most powerful food processors as well as the agribusiness elite. Meanwhile life remains rough for growers such as Pitts, Huse, and Johnson, and processors such as Fleisher’s. To get by, the unconventional operator must instead rely on the subsidies of inherited land, free and low-cost labor, and off-farm income. If alternative farmers and processors are too beaten down by the lack of resources for cultivation and distribution, inappropriate food safety rules, insurmountable debt, and inadequate pay, then, no matter how much we as consumers want local, ecologically responsible food, the people who make it may well go extinct.
All 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
