2016 has seen many supermarkets expressing their renewed commitment to sustainability, especially in the context of bananas and to a lesser extent pineapples. Several chains including Lidl and Aldi are promising 100% certified bananas.
The claim being made is that these bananas will be “sustainable bananas”. As Jon Covey, head of fresh produce buying at Lidl, UK put it: “Thismove is yet another milestone in Lidl’s ambition to provide its customers with sustainably sourced produce.”
It is perhaps a surprise to find that it is the hard discounters, Lidl and Aldi, which appear to be leading the defection from low-pay / big-pollution industrial agriculture towards supposedly socially and environmentally kinder ‘sustainable systems’, while other big retailers, like Tesco and the Wal-mart subsidiary Asda in the UK and Edeka and Rewe in Germany, are following hard on the discounters’ heels.
Up until now, the hard discounters have generally been seen as a source of trouble by other EU retailers. They have been growing well since the 2008 financial crisis and by 2014 they had already captured 17% of the EU retail market. Their challenge to other more traditional supermarkets has been to offer hard-pressed consumers even lower prices than those offered by the already highly competitive supermarkets and hypermarkets. The established big chains were forced to try to match the even lower prices of the up-and-coming discounters. As prices paid by consumers declined, so prices paid to banana producers by supermarkets were forced down (by 20% between 2001 and 2014) and as producer prices were squeezed, they in turn had to find ways to cut costs of production (costs which had already been pared away relentlessly after years of pressure from the supermarkets).
Many of these costs, like transportation and agrochemicals, could not be cut. In fact, on the contrary, these costs actually went up significantly in the same period. Between 2001 and 2015 the costs of shipping increased by 233%; of fertilisers and pesticides by 195% on average; and of packaging materials by 150%. Savings had to found elsewhere. Most plantations had made any efficiency savings they could a long time ago, meaning that the only areas which could potentially be cut were workers’ pay and expenditure on environmental protection.
Far from being seen as the defenders of sustainability then, the hard discounters were perceived by many as being one of its principal attackers and as being one of the great motors of the race to the
bottom.
It is perhaps unsurprising therefore that some commentators have welcomed the announcement of ‘100% sustainable bananas’ with a degree of enthusiasm. Surely if even the hard discounters are
‘going green’ then the future of food production will be secure?
However, the devil, as always, is in the detail and when the details are examined and particularly when the realities of everyday life on plantations are examined, the picture does not look so rosy.
For several years many supermarkets have offered some products which can reasonably claim to offer sustainability (or at least to be more sustainable than mainstream production). Both Fairtrade and organic products offer very tangible benefits but both normally require consumers to pay higher prices.
The higher prices which consumers pay finance systems of production in which workers and/or the environment are treated more fairly and with greater care. However, in most supermarkets, these products represent only a very small percentage of total sales and the majority of consumers choose to buy ‘conventional’ bananas and pineapples which are almost invariably very much cheaper.
What is new about the 2016 announcements is that in future not only the higher priced Fairtrade International and organic fruit will be sustainable but so also, it is claimed, will be the cheap, conventional fruit. In the case of Lidl and Aldi, at first in the UK and Germany (and later in other EU countries it is expected) 100% of fruit, not already labelled Fairtrade, will be certified by the Rainforest Alliance.
Rainforest Alliance certification (symbolised by its Green Frog logo) will, it is implied, guarantee sustainability and it will do this at the same low prices which consumers have come to expect from the hard discounters.
