Wal-Mart’s Impact on Organic Standards

Two articles today--one entitled “The Organic Myth” in BusinessWeek and another in the Baltimore Sun--examine the impact of Wal-Mart and other big businesses on standards for organic foods. 

“The Organic Myth” examines the pressure companies like Wal-Mart are placing on organic suppliers to sell at lower costs and questions whether this pressure is leading to lower standards.

Now companies from Wal-Mart to General Mills to Kellogg are wading into the organic game, attracted by fat margins that old-fashioned food purveyors can only dream of. What was once a cottage industry of family farms has become Big Business, with all that that implies, including pressure from Wall Street to scale up and boost profits.

The article further examines the question of companies sourcing organic products from overseas as opposed to the local sourcing organic consumers have come to expect.

As food companies scramble to find enough organically grown ingredients, they are inevitably forsaking the pastoral ethos that has defined the organic lifestyle. For some companies, it means keeping thousands of organic cows on industrial-scale feedlots. For others, the scarcity of organic ingredients means looking as far afield as China, Sierra Leone, and Brazil—places where standards may be hard to enforce, workers’ wages and living conditions are a worry, and, say critics, increased farmland sometimes comes at a cost to the environment.

Wal-Mart’s organic offensive has recently come into question in a report by the Cornucopia Institute which concludes:

Ultimately, the real risk is to the value of the organic label. Will consumers continue to hold organic products in high esteem and be willing to pay premium prices for them? If corporations recklessly concentrate just on the bottom line, at the expense of organic integrity, all players in the industry, regardless of scale, will likely lose.

It is vital that Wal-Mart source organics in a sustainable manner that is consistent with the both the letter and spirit of organic standards, including sourcing from local farmers and paying a fair price for high-quality organic goods. 

• Click Here to Visit Wal-Mart Watch’s Environmental page to track the company’s sustainability promises and join our environmental taskforce.
• Click here to visit our environmental blog for more information about Wal-Mart’s organic offensive.

Posted by Enviro. Team on Friday, October 06, 2006