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Retail is not just a passive or benevolent conduit between food production and the consumer. In order to provide ‘cheap food’, retailers rely on low-wage labour in shops and the efficiencies met through a capital-intensive agro-food system. If we take seriously the embedded relations through which retailers operate in local economies, then there is a much wider scope around which to engage both state policy and labour movement politics.

The focus on smallholder integration into markets via corporate supply chains carries with it the assumption that production for profit is the only logic available. There is room here to push a direct examination of the power of retail firms, imbricated as they are with state deregulation of the agro-food economy, trade liberalisation, financialisation of capital, precarious service employment, and promotion of processed foodstuff generally of lower nutritional value.

Saccawu has focused attention on its All-Africa Wal-Mart Alliance, which seeks to network around conditions of employment across Massmart subsidiaries in Africa. Although this is an important effort, it has the effect of limiting its focus on the employer (see Kenny 2012b). This chapter sought to examine how Wal-Mart’s entry into South Africa raises questions about the embedded context of corporate retail capital and its power in the agro-food system in South Africa. It highlights the mutual interests of the state and retail capital in promoting supermarkets as providers of cheap food and as leverage points for smallholder development. Yet it also suggests that Wal-Mart’s ‘citizenship’ status, based on bringing consumer choice at a cheap price, has other costs bound into a system that relies on precarious employment and large-scale corporate control of the food system. Access to supermarkets may seem to be an easy way of ensuring food security for South Africans but we bind ourselves into a ‘reverse Fordism’ where cheap food is necessary because wages are so low (Collins 2009). Numsa and Fawu have recently launched a campaign to transform the agro-food system in South Africa, emphasising food security by focusing on ownership and inequality throughout the food sector. Low-wage food retail workers could contribute to this campaign. These efforts provoke hard questions about how the labour movement is organised by sector and employer in South Africa.

Corporate food retailers have been portrayed as the guardians of quality, the champions of reducing inefficiencies in the chain, the advocates for smallholder development, and our compatriots who bring us cheaper food; but if Wal-Mart’s entry tells us anything it is that the public debate over the Tribunal process has had no effect on the relations of inequality structuring South Africa’s food system based on a low-wage, racist labour regime. In accepting Wal-Mart as our fellow ‘citizen’, we may find choice in supermarket aisles, but we ultimately continue to reinforce a development agenda which reproduces poor quality jobs, excludes vast numbers of people from active economic participation, and offers little by way of food security.

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NOTES

1 This chapter benefitted from discussions with Michael Aliber, Stephen Greenberg and Neva Makgetla. Interpretation and any errors, of course, remain mine.

2 See http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/09/employment, accessed 26/09/2011.

3 The state requested the judgment be set aside through an argument around discovery (information requested but not provided) in the Tribunal process that prevented full evidence being heard that would have supported its case.

4 Times Live 2/8/2011, http://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2011/08/02/walmart-massmart-merger-poses-risk-to-sa-ministers, accessed 2/8/2011.

5 Compare South Africa’s high degree of formalisation to Mexico, where only 7 per cent of the market was through formal channels when Wal-Mart entered (Tilly 2006).

6 See http://www.shopriteholdings.co.za/files/1019812640/Investor_Centre_Files/Annual_Reports/Annual-Report-2012/7_4521_Chairmans_Report.pdf, accessed 29 June 2013.

7 See http://www.cambridgefood.co.za/about.asp, accessed 1 June 2013.

8 Also, all expect Massmart to grow through expanding its African operations, understood as being a major growth area (BMI 2013; Macquarie 2013). Massmart already operates in 13 countries in sub-Saharan Africa through four divisions comprising 235 stores, and one buying association serving 480 independent retailers and wholesalers (http://www.fastmoving.co.za/retailers/retailer-profiles-132/massmart-198). Massmart has already announced plans to expand its operations especially in Africa in 2013 (‘Massmart to focus on store growth in Africa’ FMCG SUPPLIER NEWS Ventures Africa – May 30th, http://www.fastmoving.co.za/news/supplier-news-17/massmart-to-focus-on-store-growth-in-africa-3802; accessed 11 June 2013).

9 Indeed, Pick n Pay has made efforts to upgrade its centralised distribution systems in line with competitive pressures from Wal-Mart’s entry (BMI 2013). Rumours also abound about Tesco’s move to acquire Pick n Pay.

10 See http://www.shopriteholdings.co.za/files/1019812640/Investor_Centre_Files/Annual_Reports/Annual-Report-2012/8_4521_Chief_Executives_Report.pdf, accessed 29 June 2013.

11 Shoprite operates a wholly owned subsidiary Freshmark, which runs its distribution centres in South Africa. It procures both South African fresh fruit and vegetables and imports. Its website says, ‘It operates its own network of distribution centres and refridgerated trucks; negotiates production contracts with some 459 large- and small-scale farmers in South Africa and as well as 354 suppliers in the 11 African countries we operate in; sources specialty fruit and vegetables on international markets, and plays a key role in equipping emerging farmers with the knowledge and skills to produce and meet international GLOBALG.A.P. standards (http://www.shopriteholdings.co.za/pages/1019812640/retailing-services/Freshmark.asp, accessed 29 June 2013).

12 Although, the ANC signalled this shift in policy priorities in 2007 at Polokwane (Greenberg 2010:14). See PLAAS research on the varied definition (and class position) of ‘smallholder’ producers as sited in Greenberg 2013. A wide range of descriptions may be used to categorise smallholder producers, which are obscured by the term, particularly the amalgamation of subsistence producers with commercial producers. Nevertheless, the term broadly refers to small-scale producers (either by income, land holdings, or type of production). Greenberg suggests 60-80 hectares as the maximum land holding (Greenberg 2013:3).

13 The National Development Plan outlines what it sees to be the importance of smallholder farmers to rural development through job creation and food security in terms of integration into supply chains (see Chapter 6, National Planning Commission 2011).

14 See Strategic Plan for Smallholder Producers, DAFF.

15 The regulated control of marketing and pricing of food products characterised the apartheid period. ‘More than 75 per cent of agricultural products in South Africa were sold under controlled marketing schemes in 1990’ (Greenberg 2010:4).

16 Most South African retailers require EurepGAP standards at farm level and HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point) at pack-house/processing level from fresh produce suppliers. Through the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), seven major South African retailers have agreed to the four GFSI benchmarked food safety schemes: the British Retail Consortium Global Food Standard; the International Food Standard; the Safe Quality Food Scheme (2000); and the Dutch HACCP Scheme (Option B). The International Committee of Food Retail Chains co-ordinates the GFSI (Greenberg 2010:8-9).

17 A non-representative, qualitative questionnaire was administered to 109 workers and focus group interviews conducted in 6 branches of Cambridge through access provided by Saccawu. The project was funded by UNI Global. Project researchers included Bongani Xezwi, Ntsiki Mackay, Lesego Ndala, Matlhako Mahapa, Zakhele Dlamini, Tlaleng Letsheleha and Zivai Sunungukai.

18 Compare these retail workers’ wages to the latest farm workers’ minimum wages of R105/day (raised to this – itself a 35 per cent increase – in the latest Sectoral Determination following militant and violent strikes on farms where workers contested their poverty conditions). This works out to about R2 200 per month, a figure that mainstream economists from Stellenbosch and Pretoria have reported as unable to provide enough to meet the nutritional needs of their households (BFAP 2012). Farmworkers had demanded R150/day in the strikes. The report summarises, ‘The real problem is that even at what seems to be an unaffordable minimum wage of R150 per day, most households cannot provide the nutrition that is needed to make them food secure’ (BFAP 2012:vi).