As is true with domestically raised organic crops, those grown outside the United States and the European Union must meet binding organic standards set by those governments and verified by a third party. To qualify a farm must abide by rules including bans on certain chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and fungicides, and it must avoid monocropping. Monocropping is a factory-farming method that entails transforming existing ecosystems or traditional farmland into large fields planted with the same crop year after year, a method designed to reduce costs. Organic methods are intended to counteract the deleterious effects of conventional industrial cultivation, which destroys biodiversity, wipes out soil health, contributes to erosion, and helps deplete groundwater due to increased runoff. The organic seal is meant to signal that a farm abides by nature-supporting practices, which are typically more expensive to implement. (With organic certification, farmers can not only advertise their more sustainable methods, but also charge higher prices to help recoup their costs.)
I ask if Ayala considers organic monoculture a contradiction. “I understand it’s a monocrop,” he says, but “because it’s a perennial, we can’t avoid doing monocropping.” He recounts a trial his team did a few years ago with just over six hundred acres of organic soy as a rotation. “It almost killed me. Lots of expenses, weeds took over, we had a drought that year, it didn’t grow, caterpillars and other bugs . . . we had a lot of problems.”
As its certifier AZPA employs California-based Quality Assurance International (QAI), established in 1989 and owned by NSF International, an American nongovernmental organization that develops public-health standards. QAI is a for-profit firm that is a major player in the global organic trade; its stamp of approval adorns the labels of two-thirds of all certified organic food on U.S. grocery store shelves. Ayala says QAI has issued minor warnings about AZPA’s monocropping, citing the need to maintain greater biodiversity. So, he explains, despite the earlier fiasco, currently his workers plant some fields with regenerative crops. When I ask how much land is currently under rotation, however, he says he’s not sure.
Even though AZPA is clearly failing to adequately cycle in various plants to repair its soil, not all crops need to be rotated at the same rate. Compared to other perennials, sugar is less taxing on the soil and less disease-prone. So in relative terms growing cane nonstop isn’t as destructive as growing more nutrient-hungry crops such as tobacco and bananas. But, according to Richard P. Tucker, a professor of natural resources at the University of Michigan, “Sustainability depends on far more than the biological potential of a single crop.” While it may fare well in the short run, over longer periods of time this stripping away of biological complexity has a more profound impact. Just because sugarcane is typically tougher against infestation and more forgiving to the soil doesn’t mean it’s immune from harm. This becomes apparent as soon as Ayala directs my attention to the plants in the field where we’re standing.
The head of crop care digs up one of the young organic cane plants by its roots. “Here, this is the mark of a driller,” he says as he points to a brown borehole in the base of the stalk. He cuts into the plant’s green and white flesh with his pocketknife searching for the culprit, but the pest has already moved on. Drillers are a serious problem because they suck the sweet liquid from the plant, leaving it unable to mature. Every stalk Ayala pulls up carries the telltale mark. The bugs also plague some of AZPA’s vast conventional fields, Ayala tells me. But he doesn’t bring up the connection between the pest infestation and monoculture farming, nor does he mention that unhealthy soil conditions created by single-crop farming also increase runoff that would otherwise recharge groundwater sources. This is a serious issue on AZPA’s plantation since it sits atop the massive Guaraní Aquifer, one of the biggest underground stores of freshwater in the world, and a major source of drinking water in South America.
An outsider might conclude that these results are at odds with official USDA National Organic Program (NOP) regulations, but the devil is in the details. The legal text that delineates NOP standards doesn’t explicitly ban monocropping—in fact the word is never mentioned. Further, the rule sheet uses the term biodiversity just once, in the definition of organic farming: “A production system that is managed in accordance with the Act and regulations in this [document] to respond to site-specific conditions by integrating cultural, biological, and mechanical practices that foster cycling of resources, promote ecological balance, and conserve biodiversity.” The text does call for crop rotation, which all organic farms must engage in—save for farms that cultivate perennials such as sugarcane. “Perennial cropping systems [must] 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