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
