Beijing's (un)greenest grocers
- Source: Global Times
- [23:44 January 25 2010]
- Comments
Greenpeace staff promoting its supermarket ranking list. Photo: courtesy of Greenpeace
By Chen Dujuan
Just one day before Christmas Eve 2009, Greenpeace, an international environmental organization, released its new ranking list of supermarkets according to their promises to maintain food and vegetable safety. Among the 15 listed supermarkets, three popular international supermarkets shared the title for worst performance, namely Tesco, Wal-Mart and Ito Yokado. In comparison, Carrefour, was at the top of the list with more positive assessments.
Double standards
Wang Weikang, director of Greenpeace's food and agriculture program, told Lifestyle that "Some supermarkets don't have complete supervision and control of food quality and refuse to make commitments in the future." For example, Wal-Mart didn't provide any information on the questionnaire sent from Greenpeace about "gradually prohibiting pesticides" and "refusing genetically modified foods (GMF)," nor did it publish any related information on its Chinese website. However, the supermarket is "refusing GMF" for its British consumers. The same goes for Tesco. For Ito Yokado, there is a complete track-and-control system for produce on its Japanese website, and its long-term plan is to reduce pesticide use to half the average in Japan, but nothing about such commitments for Chinese consumers can be found on the Mandarin Chinese website. Two weeks later, Aeon and Auchan were blacklisted in recent surveys because they sell GMF pawpaws to Chinese consumers while only selling non-GMF abroad.
