Green Gone Wrong. Heather Rogers
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maté, a traditional tea. Francisco Ferriera, president of Cañera del Sur, says the co-op has 220 members, most of whom grow sugarcane on farms that vary in size but can be as small as two and a half acres. Wholesome Sweeteners has been working with Cañera del Sur for the last five years, brokering their deal with AZPA, and helping them get both organic and Fair Trade certification.
Cañera del Sur farmers earn their organic status as part of what’s called “group certification,” which is permitted by both the USDA National Organic Program and the European Union’s organic EU-Eco Regulation. The idea behind group certification—praised by many who promote small-scale organic agriculture in developing countries, and criticized by those who believe it can’t guarantee all growers employ organic methods—is that it allows larger numbers of family farmers to earn the organic seal while minimizing costs. Under this setup, a group of farmers pool their money to pay the certifier, a fraction of the farms are physically inspected, and if they’re approved, all the group members get the seal.
In the case of Cañera del Sur, AZPA—not the farmers themselves—organizes the group and pays for certification. (This is a common arrangement in developing countries with impoverished farmers seeking verification seals.) That means the organic distinction doesn’t belong to the farmers, but instead is the property of AZPA. Consequently, Cañera del Sur members can’t vend their produce as organic on their own. If the campesinos want to get the price premium, they are obliged to sell to AZPA. According to Zaldivar and Francisco Ferriera, if the small growers had to carry this fee, it would be their single largest fixed cost. On their own—without AZPA picking up the tab, and without group certification—most of these small farmers could never afford to get certified organic.
As for Cañera del Sur’s Fair Trade certification, Wholesome Sweeteners foots the bill, again because it’s too costly for the growers to fund themselves. As is true with organic, Fair Trade, or FT, is accredited by a third-party organization, which then grants the producer the right to stamp the official seal on its product packaging; for goods sold in the United States this label is issued exclusively by the nonprofit certifier TransFair U.S.A.; it is a black-and-white graphic of a person holding a bowl in each hand. FT-certified goods cost more for Western consumers because the items are grown using sound environmental practices, and, most centrally, because small farmers garner a higher—“fair”—price for their produce. The idea is to boost the income and therefore standard of living of peasant growers such as those in rural Paraguay. Zaldivar tells me that in the case of Cañera del Sur, FT status increases their earnings by about a third.
Wholesome lets the farmers keep the entire FT premium without requiring any repayment of the certification fees. I ask why his company doesn’t try to recover the thousand or more dollars a year it spends to renew Cañera del Sur’s license. “First, it’s good marketing for Wholesome, it makes us look good,” Zaldivar says. “Second, last year the market for Fair Trade in the U.S. grew by thirty-seven percent—that’s a lot more than the organic market.” In other words, the FT logo on Wholesome’s packaging is good PR and gives the company greater access to the burgeoning mass of socially conscious shoppers. Since Wholesome pays to maintain Cañera del Sur’s FT certification, however, the license belongs to the trader and not the campesinos. As with their organic-certification deal, the small farmers can’t sell cane as Fair Trade to anybody but AZPA, which in turn sells that sugar only to Wholesome.
A Cañera del Sur member whom I will call Eber Ibarra is thirty-five years old and has been farming since he was a child. His parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were farmers; as far back as he knows, his family has worked the land in Guairá. His fields are some distance from where he, his wife, and their two young daughters now live. They moved from their old house near their acreage because the road was too rough. About twenty kilometers from the nearest town, their current home is still remote but more accessible; for most of the year, the unpredictable dirt roads are navigable on the cheap motorcycle the family recently bought on an installment plan.
Out here the landscape is cloaked in rich grasses and trees, and the soil is either bright red or ocher; in every direction giant termite mounds rise like earthen stalagmites. In the distance round hills rise abruptly from the flat earth. Ibarra’s small, weathered house is washed in chipping blue paint, has a rudimentary kitchen, one bedroom, and a storage room, no bathroom, and no running water. The family spends most of its time out of doors, which can get difficult in the peak of summer. We sit outside under a tree in the molded-plastic lawn chairs now ubiquitous the world over. During the time that we talk, we all periodically adjust our seats seeking shade to block the sapping, extreme gaze of the sun. Chickens and ducks flap and squawk in the dirt yard near a white horse that’s tied to a tree.
Ibarra grows five acres of sugarcane on his farm. His annual crop of cane generally earns him just under $3,000 per year. Out of that he must pay workers to help harvest. He can’t do it alone; when it’s time to bring in the cane, it must be done quickly. When the mill issues the word that it’s accepting tonnage, small producers such as Ibarra must get theirs in before other growers do, lest the company stops buying. The rapid pace is also due to the need for income; by the time harvest rolls around, most growers have earned little if any money for a full year. Out of his pay, Ibarra also has to cover the cost of transporting his stalks to AZPA’s gate.
This year the harvest was difficult. After dealing with cut cane languishing on the ground uncollected for weeks, Ibarra finally got it delivered to the mill and got paid. But once he subtracted his costs for labor and hauling, he ended up well below the Paraguayan minimum wage. So, as often happens, the family will have to rely on the income of his wife, who works at the local health clinic. There she earns less than the national minimum of about $265 per month; but that, along with their subsistence crops, is what keeps the family of four fed, clothed, and able to make the payments on their motorbike. She tells me the health clinic has no medicine, and almost no supplies, so area residents most often end up relying on traditional cures using roots and herbs.
Ibarra’s good friend, neighbor, and fellow Cañera del Sur member, whom I will refer to as Luis Gonzalez, has also had a rough season. Early on, Cañera del Sur encountered troubles with transport. The co-op had a contract with a hauling company called El Corre Caminos, which belongs to one of the owners of AZPA. (Cañera del Sur owns three trucks, which Wholesome helped it buy, but these are not enough for its more than two hundred members.) According to the farmers, El Corre said it could handle eight loads a day, but sometimes collected just two loads all week. Because of this Gonzalez was hesitant to cut—if the stalks sit too long they lose their juice and with it their value. Being cautious, he waited until he knew there would be a truck, but none ever came. Out of his twenty-five acres Gonzalez cut only seven; most of the stalks still lie scattered in the field. “I feel like I’ve been ripped off,” he says, exasperated. And he wasn’t alone, according to Francisco Ferriera of Cañera del Sur, about 70 percent of its members couldn’t deliver their cane this season.
Gonzalez wasn’t able to harvest last year either because of a shortage of field workers. This type of low-paying, hard, manual labor is failing to attract a new generation. If cane goes uncut for more than two years, it is virtually worthless; farmers might try to sell it to another mill as conventional or offer it at a pittance as cattle feed to one of the area’s ranches. Gonzalez doesn’t sell any other crops; everything else he raises, including a few cows and chickens, is for subsistence. His wife works the farm so when they don’t move their cane, neither have an income. In years when there is little or no revenue from sugarcane, Gonzalez, his wife, and their daughter survive on money he earns as a laborer on a nearby estancia owned by a powerful senator.
When I ask Ibarra and Gonzalez why the collection trucks didn’t come, they say it’s because AZPA grows a lot itself, an increasing amount of which is organic. “I think this happened because AZPA has too much sugarcane to harvest,” Gonzalez assesses. “We are basically competing with them now.” Ibarra agrees, “AZPA is growing more organic than in the past, and they give priority to their own fields.” To remedy this, Ibarra and Gonzalez tell me the co-op wants to start its own mill, where they figure they would earn 60 percent more money. And, Ibarra says, their daughters could become managers there. But when I mention this to Zaldivar, he is skeptical: “AZPA would drop them for another co-op and they would lose what