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Wal-Mart Brazil Thinks Green By Andrew Winston

Nowadays, people often talk about going green and improving environmental sustainability. At the Summit 2009, Wal-Mart Brazil announced its goals to tackle some popular environmental and social problems in the world. For example, within the supply chain of Wal-Mart, the companies cannot employ slave, in other words, forced labour. Also, Wal-Mart would not buy beef sourced from any newly cleared Amazonian land. Furthermore, Wal-Mart brought in twenty top corporations such as PepsiCo and Unilever to sign these green agreements together.

Clearly, Wal-Mart is showing their contribution of social responsibilities. However, there are unexplained issues concerning the implementation. There are certain higher cost on supplies to go green both towards the supplier and the retailer, so the cost will be put onto customers. Thus, the customer choice and motivation has possibilities to be affected by the rising price of goods. That is potential threat and high opportunity cost to Wal-Mart in trade-off for business ethics. Moreover, the actual time and plan to make agreement with suppliers to operate under environmentally friendly conditions is not yet estimated. While Brazil struggles in managing competing economic developmental needs, achieving such goals seems particularly difficult.