World Food Policy Volume/Issue 2-2/3-1 Fall 2015/Spring 2016 | Page 58

What’s Old Is New Again

two ways: from large-scale agricultural
companies and from small farmers
(Endo 2014). However, supermarkets
prefer to source from larger farmers who
have considerable existing assets, such as
education, and access to roads, water, and
electricity (Andersson et al. 2015) which
“poses a challenge to asset-poor farmers”
(Reardon 2011).

The welfare and health of
small farmers in Thailand has rarely
been considered in the analysis of
the transition (Sriboonchitta and
Wiboonpoongse 2008). Some farmers
may be financially better off supplying
under contract (Sriboonchitta and
Wiboonpoongse 2008) to large agribusiness and supermarket chains while
others, particularly smaller, less assetendowed farmers, can be economically
excluded from the economic benefits
associated with supermarket growth
(Timmer 2009) and their financial and
food security threatened. For example,
Kenyan farmers who supplied to modern
food retail were better off financially than
those who did not, but many who entered
this channel were not able to maintain
the supply and dropped out after several
years (Andersson et al. 2015). In South
Africa, fresh markets are still the most
important outlets for small farmers even
though they have been largely replaced
by supermarket chains (McLachlan and
Landman 2013). Participation by small
farmers in supermarket supply chains
can also shift power from men to women
within households (Qaim et al. 2014).
Overall, supplying to large supermarket
chains can increase inequality among
farm producers leading small producers
to relinquish their farms and join the
mass movement of rural poor into

the urban centers. As noted already,
supermarkets can have a negative
impact on the agricultural environment
(Wiskerke 2009) through their influence
on cultivation methods and control over
the cultivation process (Endo 2014).

In countries, such as China,
and some South East Asian nations
supermarkets have been viewed as “tools
of modernization” (Reardon 2011)
and in Vietnam as a vehicle to improve
food safety standards (WertheimHeck, Vellema, and Spaargaren 2015).
However, given that fresh markets can
play an important function in providing
healthy, fresh, affordable, and potentially
more sustainable food within the food
system, policies are required to support
their continued existence in the face of
considerable economic power residing
in large national and international food
retailers. The precautionary principle
suggests that there is a role for policies to
support and protect fresh markets for the
benefits of consumers’ health and wellbeing at di fferent levels.
Thai national food policy toward nutritionsensitive retail
Asian
governments’
policy
responses to the supermarket revolution
have been described in the following
terms: “where there have been regulations
to slow growth (such as in Thailand,
Indonesia, and Malaysia) they have been
vacillating, partially implemented, and
side-stepped by local interactions and
co-opting of traditional retail, or format
diversification, or both” (Reardon et al.
2014). In other words, more could be
done in these countries to control the
growth and spread of supermarkets.
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