Eaters, beware: Walmart is taking over our food system
Aubretia Edick
has worked at a Walmart store in upstate New York for 11 years, but she won’t
buy fresh food there. Bagged salads, she claims, are often past their sell-by dates
and, in the summer, fruit is sometimes kept on shelves until it rots.
"They say, ’We’ll take care of it,’ but they don’t. As a cashier, you hear
a lot of people complain," she said.
Edick blames
the problems on the store’s chronic understaffing and Walmart’s lack of respect
for the skilled labor needed to handle the nation’s food supply. At her store,
a former maintenance person was made produce manager. He’s often diverted to
other tasks. "If the toilets get backed up, they call him," she said.
Tracie McMillan, who did
a stint working in the produce section of a Walmart store while researching her forthcoming
book, The
American Way of Eating, reports much the same. "They put a 20-year-old
from electronics in charge of the produce department. He didn’t know anything
about food," she said. "We had a leak in the cooler that didn’t get
fixed for a month and all this moldy food was going out on the floor." Walmart
doesn’t accept the idea that "a supermarket takes any skill to run,"
she said. "They treated the produce like any other kind of
merchandise."
That’s plenty to give a shopper pause, but
it’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to reasons to be concerned about
Walmart’s explosive expansion into the grocery sector.
Growth
of a giant
In just a few short years, Walmart has
become the most powerful force in our food system, more dominant than Monsanto,
Kraft, or Tyson.
It was only 23 years ago that Walmart
opened its first supercenter, a store with a full supermarket inside. By 1998,
it was still a relatively modest player with 441 supercenters and about 6
percent of U.S. grocery sales. Last year, as its supercenter count climbed
above 3,000, Walmart captured 25 percent of the $550 billion Americans spent on
groceries.
As astonishing as Walmart’s national market
share is, in many parts of the country the chain is even more dominant. In 29
metro markets, it accounts for more than 50 percent of grocery sales.
Seeking an even bigger piece of the pie,
Walmart is campaigning to blanket New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and
other big cities with its stores. It has made food the centerpiece of its
public relations strategy. In a series of announcements over the last year,
Walmart has deftly commandeered high-profile food issues, presenting itself as
a solution to food deserts, a force for healthier eating, and a supporter of
local farming.
It is a remarkably brazen tactic. On every
one of these fronts, Walmart is very much part of the problem. Its expansion is
making our food system more concentrated and industrialized than ever before.
Its growth in cities will likely exacerbate poverty, the root cause of
constrained choices and poor diet. And the more dominant Walmart becomes, the
fewer opportunities there will be for farmers markets, food co-ops,
neighborhood grocery stores, and a host of other enterprises that are beginning
to fashion a better food system -- one organized not to enrich corporate
middlemen, but to the benefit of producers and eaters.
The
big squeeze
Walmart’s rise as
a grocer triggered two massive waves of industry consolidation in the late
1990s and early 2000s. One occurred among supermarkets, as regional titans like
Kroger and Fred Meyer combined to form national chains that stood a better
chance of surviving Walmart’s push into groceries. Today, the top five food
retailers capture half of all grocery sales, double the share they held in
1997. The second wave
of consolidation came as meatpackers, dairy companies, and other food
processors merged in an effort to be large enough to supply Walmart without getting
crushed in the process. The takeover of IBP, the nation’s largest beef
processor, by Tyson Fresh Meats is a prime example. "When Tyson bought IBP in 2001, they said they had
to do that in order to supply Walmart. We saw horizontal integration in the
meat business because of worries about access to the retail market,"
explained Mary Hendrickson, a food systems expert at the University of
Missouri. Four firms now slaughter more than 80 percent of cattle. A similar
dynamic has played out in nearly every segment of food manufacturing.
"The consolidation of the last two decades has created a food
chain that’s shaped like an hourglass," noted Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water
Watch, explaining that a handful of middlemen now stand between 2 million
farmers and 300 million eaters.
Their tight grip on our food supply has, rather predictably, come at
the expense of both ends of the hourglass. Grocery prices have been rising
faster than inflation and, while there are multiple factors driving up consumer
costs, some economic research points to concentration in both food
manufacturing and retailing as a leading culprit.
Farmers,
meanwhile, are getting paid less and less. Take pork, for example. Between 1990
and 2009, the farmers’ share of each dollar consumers spent on pork fell from
45 to 25 cents, according to the USDA Economic Research Service. Pork
processors picked up some of the difference, but the bulk of the gains went to
Walmart and other supermarket chains, which are now pocketing 61 cents of each
pork dollar, up from 45 cents in 1990.
Another USDA analysis found
that big retailers have used their market power to shortchange farmers who grow
apples, lettuce, and other types of produce, paying them less than what they
would get in a competitive market, while also charging consumers inflated
prices. In this way, Walmart has actually helped
drive overall food prices up.
What Walmart means when it says "local"
Last year, Walmart announced that it would
double the share of local produce it sells, from 4.5 to 9 percent, over six
years.
Come and get your Georgia peaches.Photo: Walmart StoresThis doesn’t
necessarily mean shoppers will soon find a variety of local produce at their
nearest Walmart, however. Walmart counts fruits and vegetables as local if they
come from within the same state. It can achieve much of its promise by buying more of
each state’s major commodity crops, such as peaches in Georgia and apples in
Washington, and by using big states like California, Texas, and Florida, where
both supercenters and large-scale farming are prevalent, to pump up its
national average.
"It speaks to the weakness that we’ve all known
about, which is that ’local’ is an inadequate descriptor of what we want,"
said Andy Fisher, former executive director of the Community Food Security
Coalition. "It’s not just geography; it’s scale and ownership and how you
treat your workers. Walmart is doing industrial local." Walmart’s sourcing is becoming somewhat
more regional, but the change has more to do with rising diesel prices than a
shift in favor of small farms. It’s a sign that Walmart’s Achilles heel
-- the fossil-fuel intensity of its far-flung distribution system -- might
be catching up with it. According
to The Wall Street Journal,
trucking produce like jalapeños across the country from California or Mexico
has become so expensive that the retailer is now seeking growers within 450
miles of its distribution centers.
"They see the writing on the wall.
They know the cost of shipping from California back to Georgia and Mississippi
is high now," said Ben Burkett, a Mississippi farmer who noted that
Walmart is now meeting with producers in his region. He’s hoping to sell the
chain okra through a cooperative of 35 farmers. "We’ll see. My experience
in the past with Walmart is they want to pay as little as possible."
That skepticism is shared by Anthony
Flaccavento, a Virginia farmer and sustainable food advocate. "If
multimillion-dollar companies like Rubbermaid and Vlasic can be brought to
their knees by the retail behemoth, how should we expect small farmers to
fare?" he asks. Walmart’s promise
to increase local sourcing is reminiscent of its pledge five years ago to
expand its organic food offerings. "They held true to their corporate
model and tried to do organics the same way," said Mark Kastel of the
Cornucopia Institute. For its store-brand organic milk, for example, Walmart
turned to Aurora Organic
Dairy, which runs several giant industrial milking operations in Texas and Colorado, each with as
many as 10,000 cows. In 2007, the USDA sanctioned Aurora
for multiple violations of organic standards. Earlier this year, the agency
stepped in again, this time revoking the organic certification for Promiseland
Livestock, which had been supplying supposedly organically raised cows to
Aurora.
These days, Walmart’s
interest in organic food seems to have ebbed. "Our observation is that they sell fewer organic products
and produce now than four years ago," said Kastel. Ronnie
Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association agrees. Today, he says, "the
proportion of their sales that is organic is the lowest of any major
supermarket chain."
Leveraging
food deserts
Walmart has renewed its push to get into
big cities, after trying and failing a few years ago. This time the company has
honed a fresh strategy that goes right to the soft underbelly of urban
concerns. In July, Walmart officials, standing alongside First Lady Michelle
Obama, pledged
to open or expand as many as 300 stores "in or near" food deserts.
Walmart sees underserved neighborhoods as a
way to edge its camel’s nose under the tent and then do what it’s done in the
rest of the country: open dozens of stores situated to take market share from
local grocers and unionized supermarkets. Stephen Colbert dubbed the strategy
Walmart’s "Trojan
cantaloupe." For example, an analysis by Manhattan Borough President Scott
Stringer’s office estimates that if Walmart opens in Harlem, at least 30
supermarkets, green grocers, and bodegas selling fresh produce would close.
For
neighborhoods that are truly underserved, it seems hard to argue with the
notion that having a Walmart nearby is better than relying on 7-11 and
McDonald’s for meals. But poor diet, limited access to fresh food, and
diet-related health issues are a cluster of symptoms that all stem from a
deeper problem that Walmart is likely to make worse: poverty. Poverty has a
strong negative effect on diet quality, a 15-year study recently concluded, and access to a supermarket makes almost no
difference.
Neighborhoods that gain Walmart stores end
up with more poverty and food-stamp usage than communities where the retailer
does not open, a study published in Social Science Quarterly found. This increase in poverty may owe to the fact that Walmart’s arrival
leads to a net loss of jobs and lowers wages, according to research [PDF] by economists at the University of California-Irvine and Cornell.
Walmart has also been linked to rising
obesity. "An additional supercenter per 100,000 residents increases ...
the obesity rate by 2.3 percentage points," a recent study concluded. "These results imply that the proliferation of Walmart
supercenters explains 10.5 percent of the rise in obesity since the late
1980s."
The bottom line for poor families is that
processed food is cheaper than fresh vegetables -- and that’s especially true
if you shop at Walmart. The retailer beats its competitors on prices for
packaged foods, but not produce. An Iowa study found that Walmart charges less
than competing grocery stores for cereals, canned vegetables, and meats, but
has higher prices on most fresh vegetables and high-volume dairy foods,
including milk.
Local? I don’t think that word means what you think it means.Photo: Walmart StoresThe
future of food?
We stand to lose a lot if Walmart keeps
tightening its grip on the grocery sector. Signs of a revitalized food system
have been springing up all over -- farmers markets, urban gardeners,
neighborhood grocers, consumer co-ops, CSAs -- but their growth may well be cut
short if Walmart has its way.
"People need to keep an eye on the
values that are at the root of what is driving so much of this activity around
the food system," said Kathy Mulvey, policy director for the Community
Food Security Coalition.
Walmart is pushing us toward a future where
food production is increasingly industrialized, farmers and workers are
squeezed, and the promise of fresh produce is used to conceal an economic model
that leaves neighborhoods more impoverished. Are we going to let it happen, or
are we going to demand better food and a better world?
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