Op-ed: Walmart's Outsized Catch - Civil Eats

Despite Walmart’s success in shaping the narrative of sustainability, Walmart’s seafood policy demonstrated the limits of stateless corporate governance. Twenty years later, Walmart may be discovering what other observers believed from the start: Markets have not shown themselves singlehandedly capable of enforcing sustainable fishing. Only governments can enforce the compliance that certifications generally call for.

So, while for decades, Walmart, the Walton Family Foundation, and its partner, the MSC, advocated for market-based environmentalism, all have since had to turn to traditional governing bodies to meet their sustainability commitments and call for more action from regulators. In an interview with me in 2021, Teresa Ish, Walton Family Foundation’s oceans initiative lead and senior environment program officer, said, “It is kind of ironic that it all comes back to that management side, but that’s where we are now.”

“For decades, Walmart, the Walton Family Foundation, and its partner, the MSC, advocated for market-based environmentalism, all have since had to turn to traditional governing bodies to meet their sustainability commitments and call for more action from regulators.”

What this means in practice is that MSC and the Walton Family Foundation, both historic advocates for free-market environmentalism and limited regulation, have recently been in the position of “asking” the governments of countries where Walmart buys fish to bolster their fishery management and regulatory efforts.

This can take the form of open letters like the one signed by Walmart, Carrefour, Nestlé, Publix, and Tesco in May 2020 calling on governments to allow electronic monitoring of tuna vessels during the COVID-19 pandemic so that the retailers could still meet their product commitments while the human observers who keep tuna fishing sustainable were off-duty for safety reasons.

Or devising fishery improvement plans (FIPs)—in which certifiers or industry or others call for a rearrangement of fishery management in exchange for funding—which the Walton Family Foundation’s own consultants have found “must compel governments to adopt changes” in order to succeed and often still result in adverse outcomes for local communities.

For its part, MSC has announced, “Governments must cooperate to seize the opportunities of a blue revolution.” This while its Ocean Stewardship Fund is providing research for international fishery management agencies and hoping to influence multinational fishery management regulations—important work, but not easily classifiable as market-based environmentalism.

“It’s just a definition of sustainability compatible with late-stage capitalism, unlikely to be compatible with complex ecosystems, unpredictable population fluctuations, and a changing climate.”

In some ways, we have come full circle, back to traditional environmental strategies like government regulations that use lawsuits to enforce them. And yet Walmart’s corporate governance strategies have allowed it to rely on MSC’s debatable sustainability criteria in such a way that, combined with charitable giving from the Walton Family Foundation and other philanthropic partners, Walmart can achieve its sustainability goals without fundamentally changing its business model.

This reformulated sustainability doesn’t solve the problems associated with producing low-cost disposable goods and shipping them across the world, or relying on the continued, predictable harvest of wild animals with naturally fluctuating population dynamics. It’s just a definition of sustainability compatible with late-stage capitalism, unlikely to be compatible with complex ecosystems, unpredictable population fluctuations, and a changing climate.

This contradiction at the heart of a sustainable Walmart is elided by the company’s rhetoric. By declaring that MSC certification means a fishery is sustainable, Walmart is shifting the burden of proof onto anyone who says their products are not sustainable, or who has a different, perhaps more rigorous, definition of sustainability. Walmart is relying on both certification itself and whatever ecological results it has as positive environmental outcomes—as sustainable. This is an important aspect of corporate greenwashing: moving the goalposts.

Now, this mismatch between reality and rhetoric could get even more problematic: In 2020, Walmart President Doug McMillan announced that Walmart aims to become “a regenerative company—one that works to restore, renew, and replenish in addition to preserving our planet.” But how can a company whose business model depends on moving cheap goods and extracted resources be, on net, ecologically regenerative?

Barring a substantial shift in that business model, which may entail higher prices on consumer goods, it seems more likely that regenerative, like sustainable, will become a word whose meaning is determined by Walmart.

For additional reading on this subject:

Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World’s Most Powerful Company Really Works and How It’s Transforming the American Economy (New York: Penguin Press, 2006); Nick Copeland and Christine Labuski, The World of Wal-Mart: Discounting the American Dream, (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013); Anthony Bianco, The Bully of Bentonville: How the High Cost of Wal-Mart’s Everyday Low Prices Is Hurting America  (New York: 2006); Carolina Bank Muñoz, Bridget Kenny, and Antonio Stecher, Walmart in the Global South: Workplace Culture, Labor Politics, and Supply Chains (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018); Gary Gereffi and Michelle Christian, “The Impacts of Wal-Mart: The Rise and Consequences of the World’s Dominant Retailer,” Annual Review of Sociology 35, no. 1 (2009): 573–91; Adam Levy, “Walmart’s Lead in Groceries Could Get Even Bigger,” The Motley Fool, October 11, 2018; Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism, 2006; Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Sandra Mottner and S. Smith, “Wal-Mart: Supplier Performance and Market Power,” Journal of Business Research 62, no. 5 (2009): 535–41; Bob Ortega, In Sam We Trust: The Untold Story of Sam Walton and How Wal-Mart Is Devouring America, 1st ed. (New York: Times Business, 1998).

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