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Wal-Mart Associates don’t earn enough to support a family

* The national median family budget for a family of four (two parents and two children) in 2005 was $39,984, more than twice the average full-time Associate’s annual income of $19,165. [Sylvia A. Allegretto, Basic family budgets: Working families' incomes often fail to meet living expenses around the U.S 2005]

Wal-Mart wages are not designed to support a family

TooManyHumyns wrote:i consider it a good thing aside from the impact that it will have on local organic farmers in the states...

El Rhino wrote: * sometimes organics come from further away and use more fossil fuels in transport so they're not ALWAYS a better choice environment-wise.

But here are the pitfalls. Wal-Mart will now become the 800-pound gorilla among the other, slightly smaller gorillas that have tried repeatedly to weaken the Agriculture Department's definition of what organic means. There is no chance that Wal-Mart will be buying from small, local organic farmers. Instead, its market influence will speed up the rate at which organic farming comes to resemble conventional farming in scale, mechanization, processing and transportation. For many people, this is the very antithesis of what organic should be.

The industrial food chain, whether organic or conventional, inevitably links giant supermarkets to giant farms. But this is not because big farms are any more efficient or productive than small farms — to the contrary. Studies have found that small farms produce more food per unit of land than big farms do). And polycultures are more productive than monocultures. So why don’t such farms predominate? Because big supermarkets prefer to do business with big farms growing lots of the same thing. It is more efficient for Wal-Mart — in the economic, not the biological, sense — to contract with a single huge carrot or chicken grower than with 10 small ones: the “transaction costs” are lower, even if the price and the quality is no different. This is just one of the many ways in which the logic of capitalism and the logic of biology on a farm come into conflict. At least in the short term, the logic of business usually prevails.

Wal-Mart’s big-foot entry into the organic market is bad news for small organic farmers, that seems obvious enough. But it may also spell trouble for the big growers they’ll favor. Wal-Mart has a reputation for driving down prices by squeezing its suppliers, especially after the suppliers have invested in expanding production to feed the Wal-Mart maw. Once you’ve boosted your production to supply Wal-Mart, you’re at the company’s mercy when it decides it no longer wants to give you a price that will cover the cost of production, let alone enable you to make a profit. When that happens, the notion of responsibly priced food will be sacrificed to the need to survive, and the pressure to cut corners will become irresistible.

@nonymous wrote: There is no chance that Wal-Mart will be buying from small, local organic farmers. Instead, its market influence will speed up the rate at which organic farming comes to resemble conventional farming in scale, mechanization, processing and transportation. For many people, this is the very antithesis of what organic should be.