Standards for Development: Food Safety and Sustainability in Wal‐Mart's Honduran Produce Supply Chains

Abstract

Public-private partnerships between supermarket retailers and development agencies help small-scale producers reach growing domestic markets in developing countries. Drawing on qualitative data that focuses on relationships between producers, development agencies, and Wal-Martowned supermarkets in Honduras, the research presented here demonstrates how, by introducing food safety standards to development agencies' outreach efforts, but without necessarily certifying producers or offering a price premium, Wal-Mart uses these standards to simultaneously differentiate production practices by promoting quality, while maintaining a standardized market. As a result, the responsibility and costs for incentivizing growers to change their practices is shifted to nongovernmental organizations. Therefore, although an extensive body of literature describes standards and thirdparty certification systems as the means for corporations to control production practices, this research indicates that public-private partnerships are a new vehicle by which corporations can influence agricultural production practices. In addition, this article argues that the inclusion of food safety standards in development projects leads to the conflation of food safety and sustainability, without adequately interrogating which agroecological processes food safety standards include and exclude. Therefore, retailers' private food safety standards dominate how sustainability is perceived and practiced in the development context.

Sustainable supply chain management in developing countries: An analysis of the literature

“…Fourth, the regulatory framework tends to be more operationally-focused and weak in terms of promoting environmental sustainability (Mitra and Datta, 2014). In the case of the food industry, for instance, the relationship between food safety standards and sustainability requires better specification around which measures to include and exclude from national regulations and how to make both policies compatible (Bloom, 2015).…”

“…When talking about assessment, it is found that the purpose of some certifications is to standardize products and processes, thereby creating mass markets and price-based competition. Other standards aim to differentiate the products, thus establishing niche markets based on quality as a form of non-price competition (Bloom, 2015;Dolan, 2008;Vermeulen and Metselaar, 2015). In developing countries, voluntary sustainability standards primarily reach the export-oriented sectors.…”

“…Companies state that they need help from NGOs and local governments to ensure transparency in their relationships with suppliers, because monitoring suppliers is not their core business (Perez-Aleman and Sandilands, 2008). NGOs, for example, are able to provide incentives and to enforce adoption (Bloom, 2015). MNC-NGO partnerships that actively engage suppliers in developing countries can effectively overcome supplier barriers to SSCM, by initially developing the standards with suppliers' participation and providing assistance to enable them to meet those standards.…”

Modern food retailing buying behaviour in Africa: the case of Tanzania

“…Forms of marketing support could be locating merchandising officers and providing support for promotion costs. Furthermore studies show that through support from retailers to small-scale suppliers of fresh vegetables were able to supply modern food retailing (Andersson et al, 2015;Bloom, 2015).…”

Value Chain Development and the Agrarian Question: Actor Perspectives on Native Potato Production in the Highlands of Peru

“…In order to ensure that the value chain opportunities being developed are pro‐poor, the private sector, state, and civil society often come together in what are called hybrid governance schemes so that, at least ostensibly, power is diffused from the concentrated control of private actors (Bäckstrand ). Often called multistakeholder partnerships, these collaborations typically pursue environmentally or socially responsible third‐party certification schemes (Bloom ; Constance and Bonnano ). Participation in pro‐poor value chains is often an opportunity for agrifood firms to build their portfolios of corporate social responsibility, which seeks to address consumers’ concerns about externalities of market behavior while maintaining competitiveness (Gond, Kang, and Moon, ; Tallontire ).…”