Walmart, the parent company of Asda, is stepping up plans to source from one million small farms around the world by 2015, with ambitious targets also penned in for the UK.
The plans will see the retailer directly engage with no fewer than 10,000 small-scale farmers in the UK within the next three years. It is unclear how many of these will be new suppliers.
Giving an update on the retailer’s progress at the recent Eurofruit Southern Hemisphere Congress in Cape Town, Kobus Pienaar, head of the Direct Farm Programme for International Produce, Walmart and Massmart, laid bare the extent of the world’s largest supermarket’s ambition to offer more small-scale farmers a direct route to market.
The 2015 target is mainly focused on China, where Walmart hopes to source from 940,000 small-scale farmers operating on farms less than 1.5ha in size.
It is also targeting 35,000 farms in India, 17,750 in Japan, 10,000 in Brazil, 2,490 in Central America and 1,500 in South Africa, as well as a smaller number from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Chile and Argentina.
The aim of the programme is to give growers and farmers direct access to market by cutting out middlemen, packers, processors and wholesalers from the chain. “We can’t afford any unnecessary cost,” he said.
Adding suppliers to the programme can take from six months up to five years, depending on the amount of development needed, Pienaar explained. In South Africa, for example, suppliers will go through three stages of assessment, knowledge transfer and auditing before receiving their certification, but are eligible for supplier development funding to help them meet certain social and sustainability targets.
Social, economic and environmental goals are at the heart of the project, Pienaar said, and the initiative aims to bring more traceability and stability to the small-scale supply sector. He added that in South Africa Massmart had been “flooded with requests” from farmers wanting to join the programme.
In South Africa so-called hawkers, or street salesmen, are responsible for 50 per cent of all potato sales in the country, underlining the opportunity for tapping into the small-scale supply sector.
Some R7.2 billion (£516m) of fresh produce in total is sold by hawkers.
