Sideways News

At the beginning of the month, Consumers International, an NGO specialising in the retail sector, presented a report to the United Nations. This report examined the activities of supermarkets in six EU countries and measured their sustainability accordingly.

The results were not encouraging, with many of the supermarkets failing to take responsibility for the supply chains they support. One news service covered the story with the headline “Something’s rotten in European supermarkets”.

The UK was not one of the countries whose supermarkets were examined, so we thought it would be interesting to take the core measurements in the report and apply them to a quick (and by no means as thorough) survey of UK supermarkets’ CSR reports and other online sustainability information.

The retailers were graded between A and D against a variety of items which were then combined to produce three overall indicators. The results were as follows:

	CSR Commitment	Conditions	Fair Trade
Tesco	B	C-	C
Morrisons	C+	B-	C-
Sainsbury’s	B	C	C
Marks & Spencer	B	B-	B-
Co operative	A	B	A-

(Asda was discounted because it has no UK specific sustainability information available online.)

Three main indicators were taken from the Consumers International report. Their descriptions, within this survey, are as follows:

CSR Commitment: indicating the company’s participation in leading CSR indicators, board level commitment and its reporting and transparency activities

Good Working Conditions: concentrating on the policies the company has available and how it implements and verifies them across its employees and supply chains

Fair Trade Commitment: indicating the retailer’s own label commitment to fair-trade items, the extent of its policies and its support for smaller scale producers in the supply chain

Four main points can be taken away from this survey:

1. UK retailers - and quite possibly businesses in general - are more committed to CSR and sustainability issues than their counterparts in Europe
2. The Cooperative scores highest of the retailers, which reflects the situation in Europe where Consumer International singled out the Danish and Italian Coops for praise
3. While some progress has been made towards making supply chains more sustainable, there is still a long way for most retailers to go
4. Where you buy your food makes a real difference to living conditions across the world

The survey deliberately does not include factors such as green house gas emissions or waste and recycling. These issues are already regulated under UK and EU law, so retailers are, in one way or another, already obliged to set and meet targets.