SEAFOOD.COM NEWS (News Analysis) by John Sackton — Jan 27, 2014 — Walmart made a momentous announcement about seafood sustainability on Friday. David Baskin, vice-president for meat and seafood, and the leader of the Walmart team that traveled to Alaska earlier this month, announced that Alaska’s RFM certification program fully met its sustainability guidelines, and that it would source non-MSC certified fish from Alaska.
Walmart has had seafood sustainability purchasing goals since 2005. In January 2012 they spelled out their purchase policy:
“Walmart U.S. and Sam’s Club require all fresh and frozen, farmed and wild seafood suppliers to become third-party certified as sustainable using Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) or equivalent standards. By June 2012, all uncertified fisheries and aquaculture suppliers must be actively working toward certification.”
However, it was unclear what standard Walmart considered equivalent to the MSC for their purchasing purposes. In June of 2013, Alaskan suppliers, who had withdrawn from the MSC program, were told that Walmart would no longer purchase non-MSC salmon from Alaska.
This created a huge issue in the market, as Alaska salmon fisheries were widely considered the best managed wild salmon fisheries in the world, and if Walmart’s policy excluded this fishery, it seemed like the policy must be flawed.
ASMI mounted an educational campaign with customers about the RFM (Responsible Fisheries Management) certification system, which was based on the FAO guidelines for responsible fishing and for ecolabels.
Hearings were held in Congress where lawmakers challenged both Walmart and Sodexo to justify how their sustainability standards could exclude Alaska salmon. The US park service and the General Services administration quickly revised their vendor guidelines to ensure that fisheries deemed sustainable by NOAA by operating within the legal requirement to prevent overfishing and to not be overfished, would not be excluded from purchase.
There are two separate programs underway to develop broad open principles for seafood that can be used to determine whether a seafood sustainability certification program is credible or not, and should be accepted by retailers as meeting their highest purchasing standards.
One program is called GSSI – Global Seafood Sustainability Initiative – and involves retailers such as Ahold, Metro, and many others. GSSI was funded by the German development agency, and is convening stakeholder, including retailers, NGO’s, and industry, to develop a benchmarking standard similar to that done in the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) about 12 years ago.
Walmart has taken a different approach. They have worked with another group of major buyers including McDonald’s, Tesco, Disney, Ahold, Dalhaize and a number of other companies, to try and identify a sustainability scoring system that can be used across multiple products, and that incorporates the entire life cycle impacts of these products.
Walmart asked the group – called The Sustainability Consortium – to set up a seafood working group, and come up with principles by which individual companies could evaluate credible seafood certification programs.
Within the working group there was a heated discussion (see our Jan 2nd article NGO's push Walmart to defy Congress, reject Alaska's sustainability program) over whether the standards should include extensive interpretation as well – or should the interpretation of the standard be left to the individual companies. NGO’s at one point threatened to withdraw from the process unless they had a greater role in “interpretation” though the use of their own experts and evaluation processes.
However the working group ultimately decided to keep their guidelines at a higher level. The TSC statement says:
* The intended application is to provide TSC companies with consistent and transparent guidance for evaluating whether a sustainability program has been developed and is being managed in a credible way. This evaluation will be used to screen programs recommended within the Sustainability Measurement and Reporting System.
* For individual companies using the Sustainability Measurement and Reporting System to develop their own policies, the intended application is to offer guidance, or a starting point, for evaluating whether a sustainability program has been developed and is being managed in a credible way.
For a complete list of these principles, click here.
Walmart has now taken these principles and applied them to Alaska’s Responsible Fishery Management (RFM) certification system, and found they fully meet Walmart’s purchasing guidelines.
Accordingly, they have made a third revision of their purchasing guidelines to say:
Walmart U.S. and Sam’s Club require all fresh and frozen, farmed and wild seafood suppliers to source from fisheries who are:
– Third-party certified as sustainable using Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) OR
– Managing a program in accordance with the Principles of Credible Sustainability Programs developed by The Sustainability Consortium. (Third party review must be commissioned and provided upon request)
OR
– Actively working toward certification or involved in a Fisheries Improvement Project (FIP).
The full statement of Walmart's current policy is here.
David Baskin, writing for Walmart, announced that Alaska’s RFM program fully met the guidelines established by the Sustainability Consortium, and therefore the company would purchase RFM certified seafood from Alaska.
"We’re proud of our role in promoting sustainable fisheries. So, when salmon fisheries in Alaska indicated they wanted to adopt a new program called Responsible Fisheries Management (RFM), we respected that decision but also wanted to credibly stand by our commitment. We turned to The Sustainability Consortium, an organization made up of businesses, academics and nonprofits, to develop principles for credible fishery management. Based on their findings, we took another look at our policy. We’re pleased to incorporate the latest science by applying TSC’s principles to our sustainable seafood policy."
"Walmart has proudly sourced seafood from the state of Alaska for many years, and under our newly revised sustainable sourcing policy, we will continue to do so."
"We appreciate the work The Sustainability Consortium has done to evaluate seafood sustainability and develop principles for credible sustainable fisheries programs. These credibility principles will help us ensure sustainable seafood is available for future generations, and we’re excited that ASMI is working with us to show how the RFM program meets these principles."
The importance of this change by Walmart to the overall ecolabel movement cannot be overstated.
Until now, all evaluations of the various programs, whether they be MSC or others, have been conducted by the parties involved, not by an independent group. So MSC and WWF have offered their own sponsored studies that concluded only the MSC program met a true sustainability standard.
Walmart’s application of the principles of the Sustainability Consortium is the first time an independent evaluation mechanism has been used. When the GSSI makes its final report, it will offer another independent evaluation mechanism.
These benchmarking systems – although not intended to directly compare one certification system to another – represent a big step forward by retailers to recognize that different certification schemes serve different purposes, and that the broad question of seafood sustainability can be addressed in a multiplicity of ways.
Walmart does not easily change its positions. It has global sales in excess of 440 Billion. It is the largest global retailer, and in the US has more than 10% of total retail. Grocery is even more important. It has a 25% share of US food sales, and its grocery division accounts for 55% of US division revenue.
As many Walmart suppliers know, when a decision is taken the company will stick to it, often without regard to the impact it may have on suppliers or their operations – they are expected to adapt. So the fact that Walmart has changed its policy in this case is a true tribute to the importance of Alaska’s seafood, and a clear statement that even the largest retailer in the world cannot sustain a policy that does not recognize the huge successes of Alaska seafood management.
This is the first time a major retailer orignally committed to MSC has gone beyond the MSC framework to explicity endorse a different certification program. It means that more programs will be found to be equivalent by retailers in the future – and assures the long term success of Alaska's RFM certification, and its withdrawal from the MSC.
This story originally appeared on Seafood.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.