Tesco and the rest - 9 busy years to curb supermarket behaviour

Vicki Hird

06 December 2012

Success in our long fight to stop the supermarket bullies

This week has been a major success for food justice campaigners - with the announcement that the  new Grocery Code Adjudicator going through its final stages in Parliament will be able to fine supermarkets for non-compliance. 

Friends of the Earth has long been fighting with others for such measures, to ensure that farmers and workers - here and overseas - can maintain sustainable and viable livelihoods when dealing with hugely powerful large corporations. 

Tesco et al - the long fight to stop the supermarket bullies.

In the dark annals of food campaigning - i.e. the early 2000s - we began to see a pattern emerging. For many years, Friends of the Earth had been working to tackle issues such as poor agriculture policy, pesticides residues in our food and genetically-modified crop risks. But, in every conversation we had with farmers and consumers, deeper forces driving the unsustainable food system were becoming evident.

We undertook research and surveys, we talked to experts and consulted with farmer groups. In short, it was clear that the way in which supermarket buyers forced farmers to act, in the UK and overseas, was unsustainable and unfair. Their effective 'monopoly' (Tesco is the biggest with around 30% of the market) allowed routine practices which included unrealistic prices, retrospective discounts, last minute contract changes and many more. These meant that farmers could not invest in greener farming, their workers and they inevitably wasted produce. The multiple supermarkets were also bullying their way onto high streets destroying customer choice and reducing farmers' market options.

Three goals for tackling supermarkets

We started to investigate how we could use unfamiliar policy areas such as retail planning and competition policy - to see if we could find ways to curb the concentrated power of the major UK multiple supermarkets. We ended up with three key demands:

·         a stronger and legally binding Grocery Code to make them play fair;

·         an effective adjudicator to enforce it;

·         and better planning laws to ensure supermarkets don't bully their way into local food markets.

It's been a long haul. Key events included:  successfully taking the Office of Fair Trading to court so they did a U-turn and recommended a new Competition Commission (CC) Inquiry (it was fun giving evidence at that!); new planning rules on mezzanine developments; major mergers in the sector - remember Somerfield anyone?; the rise of out of town mega stores; our shop local first campaign; creating a fantastic new grassroots organisation - Tescopoly - to help communities fight back against planning bullies; working with allies such as ActionAid and Tradecraft on the impact on overseas workers.

Over the years we built a huge movement to end supermarket bullying, successfully engaging a massive number of people from farmers to shoppers.

And the final outcome?- we now have a new stronger Grocery Code backed up by a spanking new regulator. This is a really great achievement.

And what lessons have we learned over the past eight years?

·         It's not supermarkets themselves that are the problem, just unfair dealings and their stranglehold over our food supply;

·         competition policy is a limited but useful tool;

·         the UK planning system remains a problem - the CC proposed a local 'Competition Test' which has been dropped - and the major multiples have infinite resources to fight local opposition to new stores; but

-        communities can fight back - as many are - to protect vibrant local food economies; and

·         it is possible - in these dark, deregulation days - to get some new regulation where the need is clear.

We still have our work cut out till we have a truly fair and sustainable food system, but this week's success shows progress.