http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/25/news/companies/pluggedin_gunther_fish.fortune/index.htm?cnn=yes
Saving seafood Wal-Mart has unsentimental business reasons for promoting sustainable fishing practices.
By Marc Gunther, Fortune senior writer July 31 2006: 6:18 AM EDT
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Next time I dig into a slab of grilled salmon, or lay a slice of smoked salmon on a bagel, I'm going to remember Mitch Keplinger.
Mitch is a fishing boat captain who plies his trade in the cold waters off Kodiak Island, Alaska. I met Mitch in June, while reporting a story on Wal-Mart (Charts) and its push to adopt business practices that are good for the environment.
Wal-Mart suppliers - such as this fisherman in Alaska - are hoping the retailer can take "sustainable" food mainstream. Wal-Mart wants to drive those practices down into its supply chain, deep enough to touch people like Mitch. We'll explain how in a moment.
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[T]he low wholesale price of salmon makes it hard to earn a living running a fishing boat off Kodiak. Many veterans have given up.
This is where Wal-Mart comes in. The giant retailer wants to support fishermen like Mitch, who play by the rules. And it wants to do so for an unsentimental business reason - Wal-Mart intends to grow, and to sell fish for a long time, and it needs a reliable supply.
"Supply is already getting tighter," Peter Redmond, the company's vice president for deli and seafood, told me. "We have a hard time now sourcing some fish, like whiting." Redmond has spent lots of time talking to suppliers and environmentalists about how Wal-Mart help protect the future of ocean fish, and he has come up with a plan. Making profits sustainable
The problem, in essence, is that the market does not reward regulated fisheries, like those in Alaska, for being good stewards of the ocean. Instead, salmon is typically sold as a commodity; prices have fallen because of the competition from unregulated fisheries and especially from cheap, abundant farmed salmon, largely from Chile and Canada.
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Here's Wal-Mart's plan: In February, the company announced that it would over the next three to five years purchase all of its wild-caught seafood from fisheries that have been certified as sustainable by an independent nonprofit called the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). (A sustainable fishery is one that takes no more fish out of the ocean than are born each year.)
The MSC was formed by the World Wildlife Federation and Unilever (Charts), the British food company, after they watched the unregulated North Atlantic cod fishery, once the world's richest, collapse in the early 1990s.
Meanwhile, Wal-Mart will address the ecological problems caused by farmed seafood by developing guidelines with environmentalists and industry experts. Both of its initiatives go well beyond salmon, affecting wild-caught cod, pollock and whiting, as well as farmed shrimp, the biggest seller at Wal-Mart, which, you won't be surprised to learn, is the biggest seller of fish in the United States.
Eventually, Wal-Mart intends to encourage shoppers to seek out new "brands" like MSC-certified, in much the same way that some look for the "organic" label. Consumers may have to pay a little more for the "good" fish.
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-- John S Costello joxn.costello at gmail.com "Cargo cults are a faith-based religion and have no evidence for their beliefs. The only reason their religion seems silly to Westerners is that we happen to know the non-supernatural cause that started their religion. Basically they believe some dude was here, now he's gone, but soon he's coming back to save everyone. It's times like these when I tend to think Ann Coulter is absolutely fucking brilliant. I wish I could make a bunch of Christians mock a faith that believes in the imminent return of a once-living savior." -- Amanda Marcotte