Wal-Mart to Buy “Grown Local”

According to the New York Times (Oct, 14, 2010), Wal-Mart Stores announced a program that focuses on sustainable agriculture among its suppliers, as it tries to reduce its overall environmental impact.

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.

Advocates of environmentally sustainable farming said the announcement was significant because of Wal-Mart’s size, and because it would give small farmers a chance at Wal-Mart’s business.

Given that Wal-Mart is the world’s largest grocer, with one of the biggest food supply chains, any change it made would have wide implications. Wal-Mart’s decision five years ago to set sustainability goals that, among other things, increased its reliance on renewable energy and reduced packaging waste among its suppliers sent broad ripples through product manufacturers. Large companies like Procter & Gamble redesigned packages that are now carried by other retailers, while Wal-Mart’s measurements of the environmental efficiency of its suppliers helped define how they needed to change.

“No other retailer has the ability to make more of a difference than Wal-Mart,” said the retailer’s president and chief executive, Michael T. Duke. “Grocery is more than half of Wal-Mart’s business. Yet only four of our 39 public sustainability goals address food.”

In the United States, Wal-Mart plans to double the percentage of locally grown produce it sells to 9 percent. Wal-Mart defines local produce as that grown and sold in the same state.

Michelle Mauthe Harvey of the Environmental Defense Fund, who worked with Wal-Mart on the goals, said this was 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.”

Linda Berlin, Director of the Center for Sustainable Agriculture at the University of Vermont, said, “The local-food movement has been, certainly, about taste and quality of food, about providing good incomes for farmers, and also about other things that have to do with building smaller economies so we as a society aren’t dominated by the more industrial complexes,” she said.

Growponics Americas, LLC, www.growponicsamericas.com, builds and oversees the operations of a unique, Israeli, shallow-water hydroponic greenhouse system in a franchise model to bring Local Grown food to the marketplace, where it can be grown 365-days-a-year in any location.

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