Posts tagged as corporate sustainability

If you’re wondering if Walmart’s latest announcement is a sign of changing times — if a giant megastore is capable of truly making a renewed commitment to sustainable practices within an industrial food production model — you are not alone. When the largest retailer of food in the United States says they want to adjust its business model to adapt to consumer priorities like sustainability, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

It’s certainly possible that this is just a case of corporate greenwashing — that is, Walmart is merely hijacking a message that clearly appeals to consumers. But isn’t getting more local, sustainable produce sold in any grocery store a good thing? It depends how it’s done, and what you call local and sustainable.

When it comes to claims about sustainability, the devil is always in the details: how will Walmart define their standards for sustainability? How will they measure the environmental stewardship of their local suppliers? And perhaps the most critical questions — will the company offer fair prices to local farmers? Or will they lock them into financially destructive contracts that involve expensive upgrades or expansions of their farms to meet large-scale demand?

Walmart’s Executive Vice President for Corporate Affairs Leslie A. Dach said, “When we do this on Walmart’s scale, we can deliver a global food supply that improves health and livelihoods around the world.” But Walmart’s scale is a big part of the problem in our food system. It’s going to take more than marketing campaigns to fix that.

-Rich Bindell

[This is the third of a three-part series exposing the truth about several American companies that have been depicted as leaders of environmental sustainability.]

Finally, let’s turn to Chevron Corporation.  Diamond says he toured several Chevron-managed oil fields in Papua New Guinea, and “not even in any national park” has he seen “such rigorous environmental protection.”  I’d venture a guess that he hasn’t yet visited the Ecuadorian Amazon. Read more…

[This is the second in a three-part series exposing the truth about several American companies that have been depicted as leaders of environmental sustainability.]

Now let’s take a look at Coca-Cola, a company whose survival Jared Diamond claims is “deeply concerned with problems of water scarcity, energy, climate change and agriculture.” People in India probably don’t think that Coke cares about their agriculture or water rights.

Author Jared Diamond counted Coca-Cola in his personal list of company role models for corporate sustainability. Residents of India's northeastern city of Varanasi and the Palakkad district in the southwest might disagree with that sentiment. Photo by Meitene.

In Varanasi, a city in northeastern India, thousands of villagers have been actively protesting the presence of Coke in their community, complaining that the company has drastically reduced the water tables in the region by over-extraction of groundwater for their bottling plants. This has been taking place in a time of intense drought.  In 2009, India had its worst drought year in 40 years, and the situation is especially bad in the northeast since the monsoons failed to come last year.

The India Resource Center has been working hard to challenge Coca-Cola’s presence in drought-stricken regions. Says Amit Srivastava, “Operating water-guzzling bottling plants in drought hit areas where the communities and farmers do not have access to water is highly unethical and criminal. Read more…