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
