Friday, October 15, 2010

Wal-Mart to double percentage of locally grown food in U.S. stores

The nation's largest retailer is latching on to the local food movement. "Wal-Mart Stores announced a program on Thursday that focuses on sustainable agriculture among its suppliers as it tries to reduce its overall environmental impact," Stephanie Clifford of The New York Times reports. "The program is intended to put more locally grown food in Wal-Mart stores in the United States, invest in training and infrastructure for small and medium-size farmers, particularly in emerging markets, and begin to measure how efficiently large suppliers grow and get their produce into stores."

In the U.S. Wal-Mart plans to double its percentage of locally grown food, defined as food grown in the same state as the store, to nine percent. Local food advocates called the proposal significant, but questioned how "local" the $405 billion company with two million employees could be. "No other retailer has the ability to make more of a difference than Wal-Mart," the retailer’s president and chief executive Michael T. Duke said. "Grocery is more than half of Wal-Mart’s business. Yet only four of our 39 public sustainability goals address food."

The company's goals are more ambitious for other countries, like Canada, where Wal-Mart plans to buy 30 percent of its produce locally by 2013. "Our food business in Canada is brand new, so there’s a lot they can do," Andrea Thomas, senior vice president of sustainability, said at a news conference. The company will also invest more than $1 billion to improve its supply chain for perishable food, a move Michelle Mauthe Harvey of the Environmental Defense Fund, called significant. "As we’ve moved to reliance on key locations like California and Florida," she said, "we’ve made it very difficult for local farmers to actually get their food to market." (Read more)

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