A Deal with the Devil: Growing Power and Wal-Mart Team Up (?)(!)
Posted September 27, 2011 by nicolas_lampert in Environment
Wal-Mart store map, circa 2008.
In 1995 David C. Korten wrote “When Corporations Rule the World,” an important book that synthesized the history of corporate rule in the US. Like most books that present thoroughly depressing material on how corporate power has run amok, he ended it with a chapter on how to fight back. His timing was ideal. The mid-1990s was an era when social justice movements were beginning to move away from single-issue campaigns and started to aim their sites at those at the top who controlled the economic pyramid. 1999 became synonymous, at least in activist circles, with Seattle (November 30) and the anti-globalization movement. The call for fair trade momentarily drowned out the practice of free trade.
Twelve years later corporate capitalism is still pillaging the planet but one great result of the on-going anti-globalization struggle can be found in the emphasis to build alternative movements – be it the independent media movement, the organic food movement, or any other number of grassroots movements and infrastructures. In my hometown of Milwaukee, I can look at a number of collectives, community groups, businesses, and urban farm projects with great pride – projects that embody community based economies. A short list would include the Riverwest Food Co-op, the Walnut Way Conservation Corp, Sweetwater Organics, and Growing Power.
Most readers have already heard about Growing Power due to the outreach and leadership of Will Allen who has inspired thousands with his work in Milwaukee in urban farming and vermicompost (worm composting.) In 2008, Allen received a MacArthur Genius Award and since then he has been laying the groundwork for a five-story vertical farm at its current site in Milwaukee’s North Side.
All of this inspires and places Milwaukee, along with Detroit and a handful of other cities, at the epicenter of urban farming movement in the US. Thus, it came to a great shock to many of us to hear that Allen and Growing Power recently accepted a 1.01 million dollar donation from Wal-Mart. Over the past few days, I have poured over a numerous web articles on this alliance and I wanted to highlight one article in particular that caught my attention. Andy Fisher’s article for the Civil Eats blog is worth examining. A link to the entire article can be found here, but some of his points are worth discussing in more depth.
In his writing, Fisher examines Wal-Mart’s motives for donating money to a group with such a good track record. He notes that historically Wal-Mart has been denied access to some inner city communities due to grass roots movements that have successfully prevented Wal-Mart from moving in considering their reckless history of trashing labor and environmental standards. However, Wal-Mart has tried a new tactic. They have donated millions to respected groups to gain a foothold in these “untapped” areas by creating goodwill. And they have also promised to change their ways - to become a good corporate citizen – and change their practices by supporting local farmers, discounting their produce, and selling healthier food, but do you trust them?
Where is the evidence that Wal-Mart has ever acted in a socially responsible way? Fisher writes that, “It is common knowledge that Wal-Mart demands its suppliers to charge them rock bottom prices, which are not economically viable for family scale farmers.” He also notes that supermarket chains in the inner city will more-than-likely lower their own labor standards to compete with Wal-Mart (hello to more attacks on unions) and that conditions in the fields will spiral downward, as evident by Wal-Mart’s attack on the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in South Florida.
In essence, Fisher summarizes a simple fact that we all know to be true: Wal-Mart exists for one reason and one reason alone: to maximize profits. Thus, one can understand why so many of us were shocked when we heard that Growing Power and Wal-Mart would even talk to one another.
Allen’s response to the criticism does not rest well. He writes, “We, as a society, can no longer refuse to invite big corporations to the table of the Good Food Revolution… We can no longer be so idealistic that we hurt the very people we’re trying to help. Keeping groups that have the money and the power to be a significant part of the solution away from the Good Food Revolution will not serve us.”
I respectively disagree. “Revolution” and Wal-Mart to not mix and the “power” of groups such as Growing Power circa 2010 was that they provided an alternative path and an alternative vision to Wal-Mart. They did not invite one of the world’s most massive corporations to the table because Wal-Mart and their like have created the mess that we are now in. It would be like asking Wall Street to fix the economic crisis that they helped create. That path would be suicidal…or our sad recent history.
At the heart of grassroots movements, anti-globalization movements, or whatever you prefer to call them, is the idea that the local takes precedence. Small-scale is preferable to large scale. The idea is not to join forces with the Wal-Mart’s of the world and adopt their business frameworks and scale of distribution. It is to create community-based/neighborhood-based structures that can actually create real change and help us all move away from any sort of dependency that corporations have made us so reliant upon.
The goal should be to drive corporations out of our neighborhoods - instead of allowing them more access. Create food co-ops and collectives in every neighborhood and networks with organic farmers to bi-pass corporate structures. To some, this may sound utopian, especially in this climate of bad politics and little funding, but what is the alternative? Continue down the road of total corporate control? That road will come back to haunt us all.
What is so frustrating about the Growing Power-Wal-Mart alliance is that so many local movements have fought Wal-Mart hard and kept them out of their neighborhoods. Now, Growing Power and others who accept these types of huge donations have given them an in-road. What also becomes so frustrating about this is that Will Allen is such an important figure in the urban farming movement. He is a national figure - much more than a local figure - and he has paved the way for so much good. What happens when his name and Growing Power’s name is associated with one of the worst corporations on the planet? Allen might likely argue that corporate donations are needed to continue and expand this movement and the donations from the grassroots have been sub sufficient. He might also argue that the goal should be to change the food system – to get as much organic food in as many households as possible, and to do this you need everyone on board. But, the question is not the aspirations – it is the tactics. What happens to the organic food standards if and when farmers have to sell for less to get their food into Wal-Mart? What happens to the family farmers and the family grocery stores that cannot compete with Wal-Mart? What happens to the inspiring vision of the urban farm movement when it is underwritten by Wal-Mart?
If I had my wish, the grassroots would stay in the grassroots. The emphasis and the challenge would be to improve it - build a network of co-ops and do the hard work to create an alternative infrastructure that would focus on the local. In essence, keep it anti-corporate, for I predict, and I fear, that Wal-Mart will attach strings to Growing Power and others in the coming years, strings that will make life very difficult on the urban farm movement. If that awful prediction rings true, we can look to the moment when Growing Power and others traded in their vision of an alternative path and lost their power to yet another corporate giant.
Comments
Hi Nicolas, Thanks for writing this up. I won't say that a big part of me was not alarmed by this development. The very idolatrous part of me didn't even want to read about Will Allen in collaboration with Walmart. It's hard to have these graven images chipped and degraded. But another part of me thinks this is quite fascinating, and that there may be something a bit fundamentalist and impractical about the idea that Growing Power and Walmart should not even speak to one another. I am not saying that I think anyone should throw their hearts and homes wide open to what is clearly a destructive force whenever it knocks on the door. Sure Walmart exists to maximise profits from one very fundemental vantage, but it is used and can be used for so very much more. Walmart has an inroad and now maybe G.P. also has a kind of inroad. Surely accepting this kind of assistance brings up a lot of tough moral questions. Can you think of someone better to struggle and juggle with them than Will Allen and Growing Power. What do we think will happen to Walmart if we manage to make a co-op in every neighborhood? Will it just wither away and say, "Oh, okay, nevermind." Do we think there will be an uprising and it will be looted out of business? I don't know either, but until it is gone (as all things will someday be) we have to deal with it and there are many approaches to doing so. Making conditions more just will necesarilly involve a vast spectrum of hybrid approaches and recombinations of power flows. And it's going to happen differently in in every neighborhood, and some neighborhoods are going to have to deal with Walmart for some time to come.
Mike,
Interesting ideas to add to the fire. I appreciate the hints of optimism you put forth but I still think the negatives will far outweigh any good that might arise from this relationship.
Growing Power might influence Wal-Mart to sell more organic food which will help some farmers and expose more people to healthy food, but I do not see Wal-Mart changing anything about their labor practices and goals to "out sell" and destroy their competition.
An "organic food revolution" needs to tackle poverty first and foremost, and Wal-Mart will only increase inequality by slanting the playing field more and more to their advantage.
I see the global outcry against austerity programs as a global rejection of capitalism, so I think it is key to continue to resist the Wal-Mart's of the world, while raising serious questions why respected groups like Growing Power feel the need to work with them. To me, the simple fact that Growing Power would even look to Wal-Mart for funding and outreach points to the failures on the left to adequately support the grassroots, including urban farmers.
Perhaps this is a case of GP giving up too soon or trying a myriad of approaches - the grassroots and the big box route. That said, I am much more inspired by the ideas put forth by other grassroots movements in my immediate community (Milwaukee) including the Riverwest Cooperative Alliance that established a cooperative bar to help fund future cooperatives in the neighborhood. This project is so new that it is too early to tell if it will be successful or not but it's guiding principles is based on the Mondragón Cooperative movement - a large body of interrelated worker-owned co-ops under one "corporate" charter based in the Basque region of Spain. Perhaps other readers may have some personal insight if this model has been successful or not in Spain, but it's principles give me much more reason for hope than the urban farm movement looking to the Wal-Mart for support and a means by which to expand its influence.
As an ex-employee at Growing Power, I must say first of all thank you to all the amazing people that do 90% of the daily work because they are passionate and dedicated employees. The upper management, yes Will Allen included, take advantage of their wonderful employees and my past co-workers, those 90% are paid a very small salary for how much money the organization is bringing in. The average salary is about $1300/month which includes no vacation days for the first 2 years and putting in 50-60 hrs of work a week. At an organization like this employees should not be getting food stamps! I will not continue to support Growing Power until they learn to treat their employees better, and stop treating everyone who works there as disposable.
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Shit. If this is not directly connected, it is at least an exact parallel of the Walton Family Foundation's involvement with charter/voucher schools in Milwaukee through the Black Alliance for Educational Options and other front groups. Voucher champion Howard Fuller (and Madison Urban League's Kaleem Caire) are known for the same stance that Allen is taking: "we'll use them and they can use us." Well, Fuller has realized that the chickens have come home to roost with Scott Walker's blowing the income caps off of voucher programs.
Thanks for writing this up. It's helpful to think about these issues from slightly different angles.
Posted by: Rebecca Kemble at September 28, 2011 3:11 AM