Buying fresh fruits in supermarkets can be the closest contact we have with producer countries. The consumer choices we make can have a direct impact on how people are employed and paid and how their environments are treated.

Who has the power in fruit supply chains?

Supermarkets are the most powerful actors along tropical fruit supply chains and their subsequent buyer power means that in the UK and other countries, bananas are amongst the most valuable products they sell.

Supermarkets can achieve substantial profits by squeezing suppliers and paying unsustainably low prices for bananas and pineapples. Supermarkets price wars in bananas, and more recently in pineapples, continue to push prices ever lower encouraging low wages, poor working conditions, labour right abuses, inadequate health and safety standards and weak environmental protection.

In Britain, supermarkets sell 80% of bananas we eat and the grocery retail sector is dominated by just a few big supermarkets, led by Tesco with over 30% of the sector, and closely followed by Asda/Wal Mart and Sainsbury’s (16% each) and Morrisons (12%). Supermarkets can use their subsequent buyer power not only to impose low prices but can also demand retrospective discounts, delay payments and threaten to delist (stop buying from) suppliers. As grocery market share becomes concentrated in the hands of fewer retailers, suppliers have little option but to accept such conditions.

Who should monitor supermarket behaviour?

A UK Supermarket Code of Practice was introduced in March 2002 to redress the balance between the big supermarkets and their suppliers, including farmers. However, it was strongly criticised for being too weak. Finally, in February 2010 - as a result of years of campaigning by a wide of range of stakeholders including members of the ‘Tescopoly Alliance’ - a new, stronger Grocery Supply Code of Practice (GSCOP) came into force.

In August 2010 the Government also announced the creation of a Groceries Code Adjudicator (GCA) in a bid to end the unfair treatment of farmers, suppliers and shoppers. The GCA will sit within the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), though independent, and will have the power investigate complaints from UK and overseas suppliers about the way they are treated by supermarkets.

Existing competition policy at national, and particularly at EU level, is however still insufficient to control abuses of supermarket buying power and their impact on non-EU suppliers in exporting regions throughout the developing world.

Corporate Social Responsibility - what does it achieve?

Many supermarkets have developed corporate social responsibility policies to address social and environmental standards along their supply chains and are signed up to a range of voluntary initiatives. Workers and their unions have however reported little if any change on the ground as a result.

Campaigns to change legislation

Find out more about ongoing UK campaigns on control supermarket buyer power, including Tescopoly and Action Aid's 'Who Pays' campaign.

At a European level, Banana Link belongs to the Agribusiness Accountability Initiatives European Working Group on Retailers and were active in helping develop the European Parliament Written Declaration 88/2007 on investigating and remedying the abuse of power by large supermarkets operating in the European Union. Signed by more than 50% of MEPs this has resulted in a number of different initiatives being pursued across the EU which are opening up the debtae on 'fair' trading practices.

Further Information

Listen the Radio 4 You and Yours Programme ' Yes, we have cheap bananas', 9th Oct 2009: Asda has cut the price of bananas by almost half over the past year, it is a fourteen year low. Other supermarkets are having to follow suit and they are not happy. Why is Asda doing this and how can they do this? What is the effect also on growers and importers? Guests: Michael Barker, The Grocer magazine, Natalie Berg, Planet Retail, Anna Cooper, Banana Link

Checked out: Are European supermarkets living up to their responsibilities for labour conditions in the developing world?   A report which investigates the policies on labour conditions in developing countries and trading relationships in supply chains of leading supermarkets in the eight countries involved.  Consumers International, March 2010.

Banana Fair Trade: Just Trade.   A colloquium which explored how labour initiatives improve working conditions and what role such initiatives play in terms of labour regulation.  Held at the Centre for Global Labour Research, Cardiff University, Jan 2008.

Last Stop - Supermarket: The Scoop on Tropical Fruit.  A study into retailer buying power and the conditions under which pineapples and bananas sold in Germany are produced. Oxfam Germany, 2008.

The EU Retail Sector: When is a market not a market?. Briefing for MEPs, November 2007, produced by the Agribusiness Accountability Initiative (AAI) European Supermarkets Group. 

COLLATERAL DAMAGE: How price wars between UK supermarkets helped to destroy livelihoods in the banana and pineapple supply chains by Dr. Iain Farquhar, Banana Link, November 2006.

Read the full results of the research conducted in Costa Rica in 2006 featured in the ActionAid report, Who Pays? How British Supermarkets are Keeping Women Workers in Poverty.

Shopped: The shocking power of British Supermarkets, by Joanna Blythman. An introduction to the rapid growth in the power of British supermarkets and the impact of this corporate concentration on our high street, diets, farms, environments and shopworkers. Published by Harper Collins.

The Traidcraft Briefing Paper, Are International Supply Chains Increasing Poverty? provides a very useful guide to how the international supply chains work and how the increasing buyer power of supermarkets effects pricing and working conditions in producer countries.