Green Gone Wrong. Heather Rogers
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rules. The NOP is also charged with training, accrediting, and monitoring the independent third-party bodies that issue organic seals. Approximately one hundred third-party certifiers are registered with the NOP, which might sound like a manageable number. But those companies are in turn responsible for keeping tabs on thousands of domestic as well as foreign farmers and processors that sell in the American market. From early 2008 through the end of 2009 the NOP lacked a director, operating instead under an acting director, Barbara Robinson, who held another full-time job at the USDA. Meantime, the key post of head of Compliance and Enforcement sat vacant until late 2008. Among Compliance and Enforcement’s stated goals for 2009 was to “establish an internal management system” because, for the first time, the division had a staff.
The NOP’s funding is allocated with each new farm bill. Congress writes and passes the legislation every five years and has never set aside mandatory financing for the USDA’s National Organic Program. Instead, each year the NOP must slog through the appropriations process in the House of Representatives and the Senate, justifying its costs to politicians who hold its fate. Each successive farm bill sets a ceiling on how much the NOP can receive, but no floor—Congress is under no obligation to give the program any funds. Although lawmakers have never outright denied resources, there’s no guarantee the money will come.
The most recent farm bill, passed in 2008, raises the NOP budget from about $1.5 million annually to $3 million for 2009, and $3.8 million for 2010. This represents the first significant increase since the agency opened despite that organics have seen annual growth rates in the double digits for over a decade. Thanks to the added funds, and President Obama’s apparent support, the NOP is undertaking a reorganization to better carry out its tasks. Most significantly the new plan involves hiring additional employees—by summer 2009 the office’s numbers surged to an all-time high of fourteen—and at last a full-time head, Miles McEvoy. While some changes will doubtless result, the NOP nevertheless remains starved of the resources it would need to become a vital tool for promoting and supporting truly ecological agriculture.
Other facets of the most recent farm bill offer support for organic farmers, but the scales are tipped well in favor of agribusiness. The document tenders billions toward marketing, distribution, research, extension, and education for growers using conventional factory methods. The law also shells out tens of billions more dollars to subsidize industrial farms. The 2008 farm bill rings in at about $300 billion. From such largesse the plan sets aside a meager $78 million for organic research and extension over five years. A fivefold increase from the previous farm bill’s spending on organic research and extension, the sum nevertheless reveals that more biologically destructive farming practices still rank high on the USDA and Congress’s list of priorities.
What has come of the first wave of organic agriculture from the 1970s demonstrates just how hard it can be to survive while keeping a green commitment intact. Some holistic growers have stayed in business yet remain cloistered in the confines of “boutique farming.” Here they serve a limited consumer base that can pay prices prohibitive to most shoppers. Morse Pitts is a prime example; what he’s doing shows that alternatives are possible, but its reach remains confined. Another outcome is that a great many organic and natural food endeavors have simply gone bust. Innumerable small cultivators who hung on by a thread, not unlike Frank Johnson, couldn’t ultimately make it. Finally, some farmers decided to play by the rules of the market and go up against the big guys. As is true in conventional agriculture, with more competition comes greater pressure to streamline production to lower prices and create a more uniform, and shippable, product. Case in point is the Washington State–based Cascadian Farm, started three decades ago by back-to-the-landers looking for alternatives to the mainstream. One of its founders ended up taking the farm in a more commercial direction and, in the 1990s, sold out to General Mills. Some now criticize Cascadian Farm’s practices as following a less rigorous version of organic, having surrendered more holistic methods to tap bigger markets. Jeff Moyer, current chair of the National Organic Standards Board, the official body that recommends standards changes, spoke to this when he told the Washington Post, “As the organic industry matures, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to find a balance between the integrity of the word organic and the desire for the industry to grow.”
Many Big Organic proponents argue that working on such a large scale pays off because it means a lot of synthetic chemicals that would have been used in conventional farming are avoided. Peter LeCompte, once a worker on a small organic farm who is now head of organic buying for General Mills, is a prime example. When I interview him, he tells me that even though he knows working for the establishment compromises him, it’s the best, and most realistic, option for widespread change he can see. Agriculture went toxic and industrial largely because doing so was most effective at beating rivals and fattening the bottom line. When producers try to achieve greater economies with organic, they often do so by swerving back toward less sustainable cultivation methods—that’s why LeCompte and his ilk must compromise. Ultimately, however, this incarnation of organic stifles biologically sound farming because it helps the major food producers maintain their dominant position; small growers can’t compete with firms such as General Mills in lobbying Congress for incentives and regulations to bolster their market position. Big Organic reinforces the political, economic, and regulatory apparatus currently in place that favors the most powerful food processors as well as the agribusiness elite. Meanwhile life remains rough for growers such as Pitts, Huse, and Johnson, and processors such as Fleisher’s. To get by, the unconventional operator must instead rely on the subsidies of inherited land, free and low-cost labor, and off-farm income. If alternative farmers and processors are too beaten down by the lack of resources for cultivation and distribution, inappropriate food safety rules, insurmountable debt, and inadequate pay, then, no matter how much we as consumers want local, ecologically responsible food, the people who make it may well go extinct.
All the World’s a Garden: Global Organic
Most of Paraguay remains unmapped. The landlocked country lies in the heart of South America, surrounded by Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia. In the nineteenth century Paraguay was among the first countries on the continent to build a railroad; its extensive tracks reached far into the countryside and were still in use until recent decades. But the military dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, who ruled from 1954 until 1989, left the railways in tatters. Paraguay’s eastern expanse is interlaced with uncharted dirt roads built to access villages and fields, and as an initial step in deforestation. The subtropical Upper Paraná Atlantic Forest, said to be among the most biodiverse in the world, is home to a wealth of plants and rich with fauna including jaguars, tapirs, a plethora of reptiles and amphibians, and over five hundred species of birds. However, it is continuously being transformed into cattle pasture and immense stretches of commodity crops such as soy, wheat, and, increasingly, sugarcane.
The native Atlantic Forest once carpeted about 100 million acres, an area comprising eastern Paraguay and crossing over into Brazil and Argentina. Perhaps surprisingly, and until only recently, Paraguay had one of the highest deforestation rates in Latin America. Today just 8 percent of the primary Upper Paraná ecosystem remains. The destruction began to decelerate in late 2004 when the government enacted law no. 2524/4, the so-called Zero Deforestation Law, for the Atlantic Forest region. Although the World Wildlife Fund reports the measure has dramatically slowed the felling of trees, the casual observer can’t help but see that clearing nevertheless continues.
In the state of Guairá, the country’s primary sugar-growing region, only a few main arteries are paved; everything else is dirt, and it’s easy to get lost. There may be small hand-painted signs, which should sometimes be followed, other times not. A driver might unexpectedly hit a makeshift roadblock of felled trees piled high, or an unmarked, sudden drop-off. Few private automobiles travel these rural roads, but bicycles are everywhere, and so are pedestrians—in the remotest spots and along the biggest thoroughfares, all day and late into the night. The motorized vehicles I see most often are cheap, domestically assembled motorcycles and lumbering eighteen-wheelers piled high with freshly cut sugarcane. The bikes buzz through thick dust past knots of traffic, dodging the heavy trucks