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
