large organic conglomerate, Hain Celestial, sees the matter similarly. “Most consumers are simple minds,” he imparts to the audience at an organic trade show I attend. “Simple minds will look at the label and nothing else.”
From grocery store aisles the competing interests and layers of interrelations are impossible to see. Small farmers can be registered Fair Trade and organic and still not earn a living wage because they’re bound to a single buyer. If that deal falls through for any reason, the campesinos lose. The organic label on a bottle of ketchup signals to the green shopper that its ingredients—including the sugar—weren’t harvested from monocultures raised on land where native forest used to stand, even if that’s not true. It’s difficult to read these complex realities through the postage-stamp-size emblems that promise biodiversity, socially just conditions, and the abandoning of toxic chemicals. Many Westerners believe organic marks a return to a cycle more aligned with the workings of nature. But what official organic really means in such places as the eastern forests of Paraguay is not so straightforward.
After a long day in AZPA’s mill and rambling plantation, Zaldivar tells me there’s no guarantee Wholesome and AZPA will keep their prominent place in the organic sugar business. Some producer in some other country might come in at a lower price and “it could all be gone, in one day, just like that.” The short term is the enduring quality in Paraguay, and not just in the organic trade. “I can’t think of the future, I can’t take it for granted,” Zaldivar says. “All that is certain is uncertainty, and you just learn to live with that.”
A few nights later I have a final meeting with Zaldivar at an expensive restaurant. The waiter is dressed as a gaucho and serves us grilled chicken hearts and fresh steak. Our table is on a covered patio, and a group of unwashed, rag-clothed children pass by in a horse-drawn cart filled with garbage. Zaldivar is unmoved. As our conversation goes on, it becomes clear that he’s grown ambivalent about what he told me in previous days. Tonight he says he believes Big Organic can correct the looming environmental crisis. He now claims the system will save itself—pursuing social change to create ecological stability, he says, is just too dangerous. Then his cell phone rings. His oldest son, who’s twenty, has been kidnapped. He slaps his phone shut and dashes to his car. I watch the red taillights trail off down the road.
On the way back to my hotel I’m suddenly more aware of the neighborhood. My eyes are drawn to a house with the kind of lights that would be used to illuminate a football field; four squares of intense white, silently streaked by bugs that momentarily reflect the electric glare. Stationed atop tall posts, maybe thirty feet up, the lights point down into the backyard. The whole place is concealed by sheer, mute walls. Many homes in the upscale district look something like this, the physical demonstration of efforts to wipe out the unknown: the risk of strangers walking up, the chance that someone might be taken, shot at, killed.
The uncertainty in a place like Paraguay, for rich and poor, is so palpable it can begin to seem like a natural aspect of life; the presence of it changes in the way the heat changes throughout the day. The early-morning coolness lingers in the shade, near trees and bushes, and gently gives way to midday rays. But before long the sun grows stifling, there is nothing merciful about it. It singes the skin. The warmth it offered just a few hours before is now transformed into a force that’s unbearable. Then with nightfall, the heat recedes as if to rest. But it is replaced by darkness, hence the floodlights.
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