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
