Great plantations and networks of smallholder plots advance across Guairá’s lowlands and inch up its lush hillsides. Peasant farmers have cultivated the area for generations, living mostly off the abundance of food that sprouts from the region’s productive soils, and selling modest yields of sugarcane for income. Increasingly, smallholders and large plantations alike are growing organic to meet booming demand for natural foods from big organic processors and retailers in the West.
Paraguay is an epicenter of organic sugar production and exemplifies how the globally grown, ever more corporate organic food system works. The country is among the leading organic sugar producers and exporters in the world, sending most of its granules to the United States and Europe. Paraguay’s top organic sugar makers include a company called Azucarera Paraguaya (AZPA), which, according to its importer, provides a third of all organic sugar consumed in the United States. AZPA’s crystals course through the American food system, selling in stores such as Whole Foods under the brand name Wholesome Sweeteners, the Paraguayan firm’s Sugarland, Texas–based importer, which is a subsidiary of Imperial Sugar, the largest sugar company in the United States. AZPA’s sugar is also used by top processors including General Mills for its Cascadian Farm and Muir Glen products, and Dean Foods, the biggest dairy concern in the United States, in its Silk soymilk goods. Even in the era of healthy eating, the fraught and mysterious commodity of sugar continues to play a major role; as producers and retailers take organic mainstream, they are remaking natural food as processed, packaged, and sugar-rich.
Runaway sales of organic in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe and double-digit overall growth rates for the industry marked the 1990s and much of the first decade of the 2000s. Although consumption of all-natural goods has slowed somewhat due to the economic recession, the sector nevertheless continues its ongoing expansion. As a result, regional farms, even big ones, are not always able to keep pace, leaving existing local and national supplies stretched thin. In 2004, organic milk producer Organic Valley ended its lucrative deal with Wal-Mart because the dairy couldn’t turn out enough product. Unable to find sufficient alternatives nearby and year-round, processors and retailers are going farther—sometimes very far—afield. Consequently, food from around the world is appearing in supermarkets stamped with the word organic, a moniker that doesn’t reveal all the resources required to get that chemical-free morsel to the grocery aisle.
The notion of “food miles”—the distance an item travels to make it to the consumer—became a hot issue in the early 2000s. A debate flared in the United States and the UK about what made more sense, buying locally produced organic that was raised in energy-sucking greenhouses, or organic imports from warmer climates. Were the fossil fuels used to keep the vegetables and fruits from freezing contributing more to global warming than those used to transport them from overseas? The UK’s Soil Association, the country’s top organic-certification entity, considered pulling its seal for imported products. After conducting a study into the matter, however, the organization decided on a compromise. As of 2009 it began extending organic certification to airfreighted food that also meets ethical trade standards. The Soil Association reasoned that not buying organic crops from developing countries would inadvertently punish small farmers who’ve become reliant on the income.
While the discussion of food miles has died down somewhat in the United States, it has only deepened in the UK. British processors and retailers are beginning to focus on the overall carbon footprint of food (and other goods)—not just emissions from transport, but also those created from farming, storing, and packaging, and even from consumer trips to the store. To address this the UK-based Carbon Trust, a government-established independent company, created the Carbon Reduction Label, which divulges the total greenhouse gases embodied in an item, from every stage of production and disposal. Participants in the program include PepsiCo, Heinz, Kellogg’s, Coca-Cola, Cadbury, and the major British supermarket chain Tesco. Versions of the Carbon Reduction Label are being adopted across Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Disclosing CO2 releases, coupled with official organic certification, which, in some countries such as the UK, includes the Fair Trade component, sounds like a foolproof system.
Nevertheless, thorough as they may seem, these metrics can fail to capture the realities of how organic crops are grown in distant lands. Even as supermarkets brim with produce from such places as China, Chile, and Paraguay stamped with seals pledging higher standards, questions inevitably persist: What are the realities of unconventional farming in developing countries with notoriously exploitative labor practices and where environmental controls are often insufficient and go unchecked? How holistic can “certified organic” on a global scale truly be?
The spread of organic cultivation internationally is not always as beneficial as it might sound; in daily dealings, the reality of organic can diverge from its ideal in ways that are difficult to see from a distance. To understand these issues more fully, I traveled to South America in the fall of 2007 and, at 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