Wal-Mart is a Bastion of environmental sustainability? I don’t think so.

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

Late last year, the New York Times ran an op-ed about “corporate sustainability” that shocked me with a handful of egregiously misleading depictions of three major American companies. The author, Jared Diamond, is a respected historian and author of several books. But Diamond’s article is all about how some businesses can be “among the world’s strongest positive forces for environmental sustainability.” The three examples he cites include Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, and Chevron.  Really?

Author and scientist Jared Diamond includes Wal-Mart in a list of corporations who are “among the world’s strongest positive forces for environmental sustainability,” but their seafood products are an example of how they still aren't getting it right. Photo by Ben Schumin.

Let’s start with Wal-Mart. Diamond cites Wal-Mart’s 2006 commitment to source all of its seafood sustainably by 2011 as one example of corporate sustainability. This may have been a laudable goal in theory, but it was poorly executed; Wal-Mart chose to source exclusively from the Marine Stewardship Council’s eco-label. Diamond doesn’t mention that MSC has been hit with waves of criticism in the last few years for certifying some really controversial fisheries. (See my previous blogs on the subject here and here.) MSC seems to have lost credibility with quite a few conservation and consumer groups, and Diamond neglects to mention this point as he boasts of Wal-Mart’s “pleasantly astonish[ing]” decision.

Wal-Mart has also elected to support the Global Aquaculture Alliance (GAA) by sourcing Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP)-certified farmed seafood products. This certification, too, deserves more consumer scrutiny. The GAA’s standards deal with the effects of fish farming on the environment and labor rights, but the organization is mostly driven by powerful members of the industry. Some sustainability advocates consider its standards to be sub-par.

For example, several organizations have criticized GAA’s BAPs program for failing to protect important mangrove ecosystems and for inadequately addressing concerns about the length of the shrimp worker’s workday in an industry where shifts can exceed 12 hours a day. (Note that the second link here will lead you to download a 2 MB report by Solidarity Center on pervasive human rights violations at shrimp farms in Southeast Asia.)

While Wal-Mart’s intentions to remove unhealthy seafood from shelves may have been good, their choice to use a private label to certify such seafood as sustainable was questionable. Government labels are usually a better solution when it comes to choosing healthful foods. Right now, one of the best guides for consumers is country-of-origin-labeling (COOL) to help you choose U.S. caught or farm-raised fish, rather than imported.

One way you can avoid this kind of greenwashing is by choosing sustainable seafood on your own terms, rather than relying on labels.

Come back next week to learn more about Coca-Cola – a company whose survival Jared Diamond claims is “deeply concerned with problems of water scarcity, energy, climate change and agriculture.”

-Marie Logan, Food & Water Watch