Consumers ... are becoming increasingly concerned about the environment. "To retain [their] trust, we must innovate to meet changing needs," he said at the launch of the Tesco community programme. "We have a wider responsibility to society." Consumers are changing the way they shop, from increases in demand for organic produce to the proliferation of farmers' markets.
Of course there are those who are skeptical, and such skepticism is understandable. This is happening because the supermarkets see a profit in it, not necessarily because they believe in it. And as such it is a fragile good; it could be overturned by all sorts of forces whereas belief would cement it in place. The real battle, surely, then, is for a way of running and regulating the economy as it impinges on distribution and marketing to make sure that environmental concerns touch on the bottom line in such a way as to make doing the right thing profitable or at least not as risky as the alternatives and to do so in a way that impacts upon short turn decision-making.
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | The big chains all want to be green grocers - but it's nothing to do with that inquiry:
Filed in: environment, supermarkets, greenwash
3 comments:
You raise some good points. Business won't help save the environment because animals are "cute" and nature is "beautiful" -- it will have to be profitable for them, as you point out. We just have to figure out how to hurry things along using smart tax incentives (ie. NOT ethanol subsidies).
this is a tough one - do we start buying Nestle because they now do one fair trade option? no one into fair trade can find buying nestle easy but if their fairtrade option isn't supported?...
but why again should we steer clear of the people doing it right all along cafe-direct or your farmers markets just to reward big business - isn't it all a bit to studied anyway? Maybe we should carry right on and support our farmers markets and our cafe direct - even that still effects supermarket choices for the customers that do shop there - and we all do at some point don't we...?
I guess that I've come to the conclusion that there is no easy answer. I might buy Nestle's FT stuff but still I don't buy their other stuff. That way I'm making a statement in my buying in terms Nestle can hear.
That said, part of my point about running the economy is something about levelling the playing field, if we in this country say child labour and subsistance wages is wrong, why should we allow goods produced by such means to be sold here? If producers knew that we'd impose 'fairness' tariffs to bump the price up to what it would be if they'd paid properly ... of course, policing it would be an industry in itself, so perhaps not. But things like hiking the price of oil to 'internalise' the costs to the environment into the consumer-price more fully, helps consumers to make more 'rational' decisions in terms of the effects on the wider world.
There's always going to be that interplay between recognising that things are as they are and we have to work with them to some degree [so we do some shopping at supermarkets with guerilla buying strategies] but we also recognise that there is a place for bucking the trends and pushing something new or different. I don't think that there are easy ways to tell which is which. I also think that the debates and discussions we have around what we do is part of the process of change. So the important thing is to be able to defend what we do at that time and to be open to change our minds, having the humility to recognise we could be wrong or even just that it may be time for us to do it differently.
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