Green Gone Wrong. Heather Rogers

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 without sacrificing the price premium—which can be 10, 30, 50 percent or more above the cost of conventional food—because, as LeCompte puts it, “people’s faith in organic is often not founded in knowledge.” The General Mills executive isn’t alone in this assessment. Bruno Fischer, director of international procurement for another 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.