Standards for Development: Food Safety and Sustainability in Wal-Mart's Honduran Produce Supply Chains

Public-private partnerships between supermarket retailers and development agencies help small-scale producers reach growing domestic markets in developing countries. Drawing on qualitative data that focuses on relationships between producers, development agencies, and Wal-Mart-owned supermarkets in Honduras, the research presented here demonstrates how, by introducing food safety standards to development agencies' outreach efforts, but without necessarily certifying producers or offering a price premium, Wal-Mart uses these standards to simultaneously differentiate production practices by promoting quality, while maintaining a standardized market. As a result, the responsibility and costs for incentivizing growers to change their practices is shifted to nongovernmental organizations. Therefore, although an extensive body of literature describes standards and third-party certification systems as the means for corporations to control production practices, this research indicates that public-private partnerships are a new vehicle by which corporations can influence agricultural production practices. In addition, this article argues that the inclusion of food safety standards in development projects leads to the conflation of food safety and sustainability, without adequately interrogating which agroecological processes food safety standards include and exclude. Therefore, retailers' private food safety standards dominate how sustainability is perceived and practiced in the development context.