Assembled but unrehearsed: corporate food power and the‘dance’ of supply chain sustainabilitySusanne Freidberg

Department of Geography, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

ABSTRACTIn recent years, many of the companies collectively known as ‘BigFood’ have undertaken efforts to assess and improve agriculturalsustainability, both within their own supply chains and asmembers of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs). Taking upFriedmann’s call for closer attention to corporate sustainabilitypractices, this paper finds that companies are doing more thanthey advertise, but making slower progress than originally hoped.Up to a point, political economy perspectives on corporate powerand governance help to explain both why these MSIs have takenshape, and why their corporate members’ immense market powermight not guarantee quick results. Yet these perspectives do notfully capture how corporations’ sustainability efforts contend withnot only other actors’ challenges to their legitimacy and authority,but also their own lack of knowledge and access to information.This paper therefore also draws on global assemblage and scienceand technology studies (STS) frameworks in order to analyzecorporate power – and its limits – inside a set of ongoingsustainability initiatives.

KEYWORDSCorporations; assemblages;food regime; sustainability;science and technologystudies; farmers

Introduction

We look at our business and say, ‘How can we remake ourselves?’ (Richard Smucker, CEO ofSmucker’s (Fortune, May 15, 2015))

Fortune magazine called it a ‘war,’ the New York Times described a ‘seismic shift;’ theGuardian simply asked, was it the end? All these 2015 headlines referred to theominous trends facing the branded manufacturers known collectively as Big Food(Fortune, May 15; New York Times, November 6; Guardian, March 12). Consumers wereincreasingly opting for organic and niche brands, and bypassing the supermarket’scenter aisles in favor of the supposedly fresher foods around the periphery. As companiesreported shrinking market shares and billions of dollars in lost sales, Campbell’s then-CEODenise Morrison warned that they would need to do more than freshen up a few productlines in order to reverse consumers’ ‘mounting distrust of so-called Big Food’ (Time, Feb-ruary 18, 2015).

In fact, as Fortune observed, nearly all the major manufacturers were ‘radically rethink-ing’ their recipes – and much else. Some committed to rid their products of artificial flavors

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

CONTACT Susanne Freidberg freidberg@dartmouth.edu Department of Geography, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH03755, USA

THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIEShttps://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2018.1534835

and colors; some had them certified as genetically modified organism (GMO)-free. Somebought up organic brands, introduced new ‘all-natural’ lines, or invested in vegan startups;some launched interactive websites such as Campbell’s whatsinmyfood.com and Kellogg’sopenforbreakast.com. Accused of churning out ‘edible food-like substances’ (Pollan 2009),at least some companies now reassure consumers that they offer ‘real food that is madewith real ingredients and fits into real lives’ (Alexander 2015, 21).

Some of food manufacturers’most ambitious commitments focus not on what ingredi-ents they use but rather how and where they are produced. In 2013, General Millsannounced that by 2020 it would sustainably source 100 percent of its ten ‘priority ingre-dients’ (Lynch 2014) from US corn to Madagascar vanilla; Kellogg’s, Coca-Cola, andPepsiCo, among others, have since made similar sustainable sourcing commitments. Anumber of companies have pledged to significant time-bound cuts in their total green-house gas (GHG) emissions, including those occurring in their supply chains.

In a 2016, Journal of Peasant Studies commentary on food regime analysis, Friedmannpointed to the corporate embrace of sustainability as one of several reasons to questionthe analytical value of the concept that she and McMichael had developed yearsbefore. McMichael’s notion a corporate food regime, in particular, she argued, ‘turns amethod into a presumed object, at best something we think we know in advance, andat worst something that is imagined to act powerfully - and uni-directionally - in theworld’ (Friedmann 2016, 674). Without assuming that corporate talk about sustainableagriculture amounted to substantive action, much less a capitalist transition on thescale that food regime scholars have traditionally documented, she called for more con-versation with other literatures, and more attention to what corporations ‘actually do.’

This paper takes up both of Friedmann’s recommendations. While she references litera-ture relevant to epochal sociotechnical transitions (Geels 2002), this paper draws on scho-larship useful for examining what corporations do and say in the context of a set of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) to assess and improve agricultural sustainability. Focused onthis more micro and immediate scale, the paper does not join the long-running debatesabout food regime theory in general (Goodman and Watts 1994; Campbell and Dixon2009), or McMichael’s (2009) conception of the corporate food regime in particular(Pechlaner and Otero 2010; Otero 2012; Jakobsen 2018). Nor does the paper pass judg-ment on whether such initiatives are likely to make commercial agriculture more sustain-able, even in the narrow sense of more eco-efficient. Certainly they invite familiar critiquesof corporate environmentalism, i.e. that it relies on technological fixes to sustain businessas usual (Wallace and Kock 2012; Clapp, Newell, and Zoe Brent 2018). Yet a closer look findsthat the corporate actors are themselves in unfamiliar territory, in more than one sense.They are dealing with what are for them novel problems, with new tools (which, as Iexplain, differ from the standards and certifications long deployed to govern agri-foodsupply chains) in places where they often have limited knowledge and influence – allwith uncertain environmental and commercial payoffs. In short, a closer look at theseinitiatives provides new insights into the limits of and challenges to business power(Fuchs 2005; Falkner 2017).

Friedmann has called the greening of agri-food corporations a ‘dance of creativity andappropriation’ (2016, 675). This paper borrows the metaphor of a dance—one that islargely unrehearsed—to describe the food industry’s sustainability initiatives. It does sothrough three assertions. First, these initiatives have seen plenty of stumbling. Of note

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were early projects that overestimated both consumers’ interest in information aboutfood’s complete environmental footprint and the supply chain’s ability to generate it.Second, the effectiveness of these initiatives depends on both companies’ ‘partnering’with rivals and the guidance of other actors, ranging from large environmental NGOs toacademic social scientists. And third, even with all that support, companies do not entirelycommand the room. In contrast to earlier supermarket-led efforts to certify select productsas ‘food from somewhere’ (Campbell 2009), today’s food industry sustainability initiativesalso seek to enlist producers of commodities such as corn and soy, the raw material of‘food from nowhere.’ Especially in the United States Midwest, these producers – mostlylarge-scale family farmers – have proven reluctant partners.

Up to a point, political economy perspectives on corporate power help to explain thetensions observed both among companies and between companies and other actors,such as NGOs and farmers. I discuss some of the most pertinent scholarship below.However I also draw from the overlapping literatures on global assemblages andscience and technology studies (STS), which are in some ways more suited to thispaper’s scales of analysis. In particular, these literatures help us appreciate the contingencyof the MSIs’ efforts, how individual actors contend with limited knowledge, troublesometools, and the enrolling of others in their sustainability work and how, under these circum-stances, critical scholars might productively intervene.

The paper draws from an ongoing study that has consisted of semi-structured inter-views, document analysis, and extensive participant observation at MSI events (Freidberg2017a). Since 2014 I have interviewed roughly 50 MSI participants, most of them corporatesustainability personnel but also MSI staff members and representatives of participatingNGOs, universities and grower organizations. Among the corporate interviewees, themajority work for major branded food manufacturers, with a smaller number representingretailers, commodity trader/processors, and agricultural input suppliers. The MSI eventshave included annual summits as well regular participation in two MSIs’ working groups.

Varieties and contingencies of corporate power

Although the ‘world historical’ perspective of food regime analysis (Friedmann and McMi-chael 1989) has not traditionally focused on the diverse forms and interests of corporatepower, other strands of political economy scholarship have done so. Three are especiallygermane here. The first examines power as exercised within ‘global chains,’ broadlydefined, the second on corporate agri-food governance, in and beyond supply chains,and the third on the divisions and differences that limit ‘business power.’ Most notableabout the first is how much the frames of analysis have broadened over time. While theearliest writing on global commodity chains distinguished between those ‘driven’ byeither buyers or producers (Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994) later typologies accommodatemore objectives and scales of governance, as well as more potentially influential actors,such as NGOs and standard-setting bodies (Ponte and Sturgeon 2013; Bair and Palpacuer2015). They also recognize that buyer power does not preclude supplier agency, meaningthat effective governance is never a given (Bair and Werner 2011; Dallas et al. 2017).

To appreciate the different ways and places that power can be both exercised and chal-lenged is perhaps especially important in analyses of corporate agri-food governance,given the dispersed and varied nature of agricultural production and the often high-

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profile nature of the concerns – whether about food safety, quality, sustainability, or thewelfare of workers and animals – that such governance is supposed to address. Accord-ingly, Clapp and Fuchs (2009) distinguish between corporations’ instrumental, structuraland discursive power—that is, their abilities to directly influence regulatory decisions(i.e. via lobbying), predetermine regulatory options, and frame problems and solutionsin ways that reinforce their own legitimacy (see also Clapp 2016). On one hand, allthree types of power have helped make private agri-food governance the norm, especiallyat the global scale, in that major food retailers and other ‘big brands’ are now expected tonot only regulate the quality and safety of their own products, typically via standards(Fuchs, Kalfagianni, and Havinga 2011), but also contribute to solving problems rangingfrom deforestation to smallholder poverty to child malnutrition (Blowfield and Dolan2014; Elder and Dauvergne 2015; Street 2015; Dauvergne 2017). On the other hand,with this expectation comes visibility but not necessarily credibility or any other payoff.Consumers who associate ‘Big Food’ with unhealthy ingredients may not be convincedby (or even care about) companies’ goals to source those ingredients sustainably (Scott2018), especially if high-profile NGOs raise doubts about either the goals themselves orcompanies’ abilities to meet them (e.g. Greenpeace 2018).

Falkner (2017) also recognizes the capacity of environmental NGOs and activist cam-paigns to undermine corporate legitimacy, despite their relatively limited resources. Theprimary focus of his ‘neopluralist’ perspective, however, is on the differences between cor-porations that can play to activists’ advantage, and that limit corporations’ overall power.The European public’s opposition to GMOs, for instance, led brand-sensitive retailers tofirst label and then ban GMO products, thus depriving biotechnology firms and NorthAmerican food processors of a major market. More recently, varied corporate stanceson climate policy highlight the differences not only between industrial sectors—i.e.agri-food versus oil – but also between ‘technological leaders and laggards’ (Falkner2017, 33). Even in the many consortia, stewardship councils, commodity roundtablesand other MSIs that corporations have voluntarily joined to address a recognizedproblem – including, in this case, environmental risks to raw material supplies – diverseinterests and capacities make for likely conflict, or at least persistent tensions.

In short, an abundance of scholarship on corporate governance in and beyond agri-food supply chains helps explain not only why many companies have joined MSIsdevoted to agricultural sustainability, but also why their collective market power mightnot get them what they want. To appreciate what happens inside these initiatives,however, it helps to downscale yet further, and examine the different relationshipswithin them, as well as how different actors understand them. Among other things, thisscale of analysis reveals how much corporate actors depend on others for certain kindsof knowledge and information access, and how much these matter to their own con-ceptions of who is credible and who is a sustainability leader versus laggard.

One source of insights into such relationships is the scholarship on global assemblages(Collier and Ong 2005). While the basic notion of assembled actors, technologies and prac-tices has seen wide and varied use in agri-food studies (see for example Forney, Rosin, andCampbell 2018) the most pertinent studies examine contemporary global projects togovern specific industries, trades and livelihoods. Whether focused on community forestmanagement (Murray Li 2007), the international bioethanol market (Hollander 2010), orthe certification of sustainable fisheries, aquaculture and palm oil production (Köhne

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2014; Havice and Iles 2015; Vandergeest, Ponte, and Bush 2015), these studies highlighthow many things must come together – temporally, geographically, ideologically – tostabilize and legitimate governance arrangements for any length of time.

What makes such assemblages global is not necessarily their geographic scope somuch as their claims to universal goals and guiding principles, such as an emphasis on‘science-based’ rule-making (Hatanaka 2010). Suffice to say that universals are alwaysdefined and operationalized somewhere, and in ways that may be rejected elsewhere(Collier and Ong 2005). This is especially true of projects to govern places and subjectsas diverse and spatially dispersed as farmers tend to be. Studies of smallholders’ encoun-ters with global standards regimes find many examples of how they variously interpret,negotiate or otherwise maneuver around requirements (Dunn 2005; Hatanaka 2010;Ouma 2010). Similarly, the food industry’s sustainability initiatives have found that evenindustrial-scale farmers do not necessarily agree with their measures of sustainable agri-culture. The assemblage framework recognizes the likelihood of such tensions, and theamount of strategizing and outreach needed to win even farmers’ minimal cooperation.

Assemblage thinking also attends to the role of non-humans in making governancearrangements cohere – or not. In the MSIs examined here, for instance, the minimalcooperation needed from farmers is a willingness to share certain data, typically viaonline platforms. In theory the data then flow down the supply chain to the companiesthat want to be able to claim progress toward their sustainable sourcing goals. In practice,the different MSIs have spent years working on both technical roadblocks in the data flow(incompatible and overly complex platforms, among others) and the question of what itcan credibly say about agroecologies that vary across both space and time, even in themonocropped US Midwest. Put somewhat differently: whereas political economy analysestend to see either social movements or uncooperative locals (i.e. smallholders) as theprimary threats to the legitimacy and effectiveness of corporate governance (Friedmann2005), the assemblage approach acknowledges a much broader range of potentiallydestabilizing forces, not all of them overtly oppositional.

Tools to (try to) assess and improve

As the previous examples suggest, scholarship on assemblages overlaps with STS in itsappreciation for how governance depends on science and technology, broadly defined.Science needs to provide guidance and credibility; technology needs to (among otherthings) facilitate visibility, communication and the disciplining of subjects, all at a distance.But can corporate power ensure these things happen? On one hand, a long line of STSresearch documents how different forms of corporate power – instrumental, structuraland discursive – have together shaped both the direction and outcomes of scientificresearch, especially in fields with high commercial stakes such as biotechnology, pharma-ceuticals and nutrition (Kloppenburg 2005; Folker, Holm, and Sandøe 2009; Sismondo2011; Clapp and Scrinis 2016). They have also helped build scientific as well as philanthro-pic support for ‘climate smart agriculture,’ now the focus of a global MSI which Newell andTaylor argue will expand markets for corporate goods ranging from GMOs to crop insur-ance (Newell and Taylor 2017).

On the other hand, STS scholars do not assume that a corporation’s power, howeverdefined, explains either how or how successfully it mobilizes science or technology

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toward a particular end (Latour 1990, 56). The fact that Coca-Cola spent millions of dollarson research that exonerates sugary beverages from blame for obesity (O’Connor 2015)does not mean it can buy credible evidence that it sources corn syrup sustainably.Getting such evidence always requires enrolling subjects, human and otherwise, andthat requires technologies besides (though including) money (Latour 1983; 1990). It alsorequires a stable and widely accepted understanding of what counts as evidence, whichis by no means assured even in long-established research fields (such as nutrition; Makiet al. 2014). Indeed this was one of the initial and ongoing tasks of the MSIs examinedhere: to determine what broader audiences would consider acceptable evidence of on-farm sustainability, and what kind of tools would be needed to collect it.

To an extent, the resulting assessment techniques resemble the ‘feedback loops’ estab-lished by supermarkets in the late 1990s (Campbell 2009), in that they are supposed togenerate information that will help companies both govern distant farms and demon-strate accountability. But supermarkets at that point primarily wanted information certify-ing farmers’ compliance with standards for food quality, safety, and social responsibility.This information helped supermarkets govern what they considered high-risk supplychains (typically due to the perceived potential for food scares or scandals), and alsorespond to social movement demands for ‘food from somewhere.’ While these risks anddemands have hardly gone away, the MSIs examined here seek to address the moreglobal (as in universal) risks posed by climate change and resource scarcity, and theyseek to do so with data rather than certifications. This has required developing newtools for collecting information, and introducing them into supply chains where theiruptake is by no means assured.

From an STS perspective, all these recent developments offer opportunities to examinehow science and technology operate as ‘political agents’ (Jasanoff 2004, 14) with impor-tant but not predetermined effects on how, and with whose participation, the corporatepursuit of agricultural sustainability unfolds. In other words, such a perspective does notassume that the MSIs and their tools represent simply the latest manifestations of corpor-ations’ power to govern the food supply in ways that suit their own bottom-line interests.

The false dawn of ecological transparency

If market power alone were enough to drive progress toward sustainable sourcing, nocompany would be better positioned to do so than Walmart, the world’s largest retailer.That was the hope, anyway, when Walmart announced in 2009 that it would create a‘global sustainable product index’ (Food Industry News, July 21 2009). A database of con-sumer goods’ cradle-to-grave environmental and social impacts would, in theory,enable Walmart to generate quantitative, comparable information about every productit sold. As both consumers and Walmart used this information to make choices – consu-mers about what to buy, Walmart about what to stock—suppliers would, in theory,compete to offer them measurably more sustainable goods (Kanter 2009). Walmartemphasized that while it had not yet determined how to produce this informationmuch less share it with consumers, it would draw guidance from a newly-formed groupof suppliers, NGOs and experts known as the Sustainability Consortium (TSC).

The most breathless media coverage described Walmart’s proposed index as an‘environmental game changer,’ heralding a ‘a new kind of capitalism’ (Kanter 2009), and

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the ‘dawning of the age of ecological transparency’ (Goleman 2009). The project was notentirely unprecedented, however. In 2007 the world’s third largest retailer, the UK-basedTesco, had committed to universal carbon footprint labeling. Working with the consul-tancy Carbon Trust, it would need data on the cradle-to-grave GHG emissions for some70,000 product lines. Like Walmart, Tesco stressed that greener products would not costmore. As its chief executive put it, ‘to achieve a mass movement in green consumptionwe must empower everyone – not just the enlightened or the affluent’ (Leahy 2007).Both retailers anticipated that suppliers’ efforts to minimize waste and energy usewould, if anything, make sustainable products less expensive – unlike the certifiedorganic, fair and ethical goods that had previously served as the mainstay of retailers’social responsibility claims (Friedmann 2005; Guthman 2007).

Yet within three years Tesco had given up on carbon labels, and TSC had quietlychanged course. Walmart’s future sustainability index would no longer provide consumerswith information about individual products. Instead Walmart would use sets of ‘key per-formance indicators’ (KPIs) to survey and score suppliers on broad categories of products,such as bread or diapers. Framed as multiple-choice questions about specific social andenvironmental concerns in different products supply chains, KPIs were supposed drivechange through business-to-business (‘B2B’) rather than consumer-facing disclosures.

Why the change of plans? Briefly, it had become clear that generating universalenvironmental product ratings and labels would take far longer than expected – poten-tially centuries – yet have little effect on consumers’ purchases (The Grocer, February 4,2012). The latter problem I return to shortly. The slow pace, meanwhile, owed onlypartly to the complex and data-intensive modeling (known as life cycle assessment, orLCA) required to calculate product footprints precisely enough for labeling (Freidberg2015). The more basic problem was a lack of data, period. Consumer goods companieswith otherwise sophisticated systems for tracking sales, costs, and delivery schedulesknew little about where or how their raw materials were produced. Food manufacturersknew the least of all, especially about the commodity ingredients sourced through longand scattered supply chains. In short, the earlier hype about ‘game-changing’ labeling pro-jects assumed that if corporations as powerful as Walmart or Tesco began asking questionsabout products’ environmental impacts, suppliers – helped, it was assumed, by rapidscientific and technological advance – would find ways to answer them. This did nothappen, at least not quickly enough.

Needing answers and others

Yet the questioning continued, especially in the food industry. Indeed, although the tworetailers’ product labeling and rating projects failed in their original intent, they demon-strated to manufacturers what the environmental modelers already knew: namely thatmost of food’s environmental impacts occur on the farm (not in transport or packaging,as was once assumed) (Weber and Matthews 2008; Mogensen et al. 2011). Many of Wal-mart’s KPIs asked about the processes behind those impacts, such as fertilizer and irriga-tion use; most manufacturers did not have answers. By the early 2000-teens it was alsoclear that agriculture was also where food companies were most acutely exposed toextreme weather and other effects of climate change. In the years since they havecome under increasing pressure to disclose their supply chain emissions, water use and

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other measures of material risk to investor-facing organizations such as CDP (formerly theCarbon Disclosure Project) and Ceres (Grossman 2012; Pattberg 2012). NGOs such asOxfam and Greenpeace also began rating food manufacturers’ environmental programs,with particular attention to how far up their supply chains they reached, and how muchthey disclosed (Greenpeace 2016; Oxfam n.d.).

The external inquiries and mounting evidence of farm-based environmental riskstogether prompted many Big Food companies to publically commit to time-bound sus-tainable sourcing goals. At the same time, companies stepped up their participation inMSIs where they hoped to generate not only answers to the many questions asked ofthem, but better answers over time. The most important of these include Field toMarket, the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI) Platform, the Cool Farm Alliance, theStewardship for Specialty Crops Index (SISC), and the Innovation Center for US Dairy.

All these MSIs define sustainability as a process of continuous and measurable improve-ment. It is a stock business definition, easily criticized for helping companies claim pro-gress on a ‘journey’ without committing to any particular destination (Milne, Kearins,and Walton 2006). But alongside the fact that many of the MSIs’ corporate membershave indeed committed to specific goals and deadlines, it is striking how much effortthey devote to assessing progress in ways that offer little direct benefit to brand image.They are collecting data, for instance, on the efficiency of on-farm energy, water, landand nitrogen use, as well as on water quality, soil health, and habitat conservation. Evenshowing progress requires several years of data, but in the meantime none of this infor-mation is destined for a label. If the food industry once thought that consumers wouldmake use of what Walmart described as ‘complete’ environmental information abouttheir products, market research soon indicated otherwise. During Tesco’s short-livedcarbon labeling project it became clear that not even the small proportion of shopperswho understood the ‘grams of CO2’ unit showed any interest in using this informationto seek out low-carbon products (Upham, Dendler, and Bleda 2011).

The limited marketing value of food companies’ agricultural sustainability assessmentactivities can be read two ways. On one hand, it underscores that these activities arenot just about marketing or even just meeting external demands for disclosure,whether from Walmart, NGOs or investor-facing agencies; rather, to varying degrees,they are driven by real concerns about the sustainability of raw material supplies. Onthe other hand, it is a problem. After all, the food manufacturers participating in theMSIs mentioned above (Unilever, General Mills, Kellogg’s, PepsiCo, Mars, Campbell,among others) place enormous value in their individual brands, which have suffered inrecent years from the tarnished image of ‘Big Food’ as a whole. Collectively they haveperhaps never had greater need for effective green marketing. But companies have alsogrown cautious about making green claims that they cannot support with hard evidence– thus the need for farmers’ data. In short, while the relative invisibility of these data-col-lection efforts speaks to intents other than greenwash, the invisibility itself is not intended.

Like the goal of continuous improvement, the multi-stakeholder form of corporate agri-cultural sustainability initiatives invites familiar critiques, i.e. that they serve mostly as per-formances of participatory governance, aimed more at garnering legitimacy forcorporations and large environmental NGOs than giving voice to other stakeholders(Cheyns 2011; Fuchs et al. 2011; Ponte and Sturgeon 2013). The MSIs examined here areclearly exclusive organizations. Their memberships are limited and costly, their meetings

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typically private. But it is also clear that their seemingly most powerful members – at leastas defined by their positions in ‘buyer-driven’ agri-food supply chains (Gereffi and Lee2012) – could not accomplish much by themselves. As early efforts to build Walmart’s sus-tainability index showed, both the retailer and its big brand suppliers lacked not only basicinformation about the environmental impacts of their raw material supplies, but also theknowledge and influence they needed to get it.

The lack of knowledge reflected these companies’ traditional expertise in food, not agri-culture. At least initially, their sustainability teams were small and typically staffed by man-agers redeployed from elsewhere in their companies, and equipped with little backgroundin agriculture or environmental science. One described a previous position in R&D,working on questions ‘like how can we put the coating on cereal so we don’t need touse so much sugar.’ They admit to ‘steep learning curves;’ one said he wished he had ‘asilver bullet to learn faster.’ The lack of influence, meanwhile, reflected the length of pro-cessed food supply chains; manufacturers sourced the bulk of their ingredients from com-modity trading companies or cooperatives. They often knew only very roughly where theraw materials had been produced, and even if they did know, they had no direct contactwith or control over the producers (Freidberg 2017b). As one manager said of farmersgrowing corn, one of the raw materials her company had pledged to source sustainably,‘We’re talking about people who don’t owe [company X] a thing.’

Food retailers and manufacturers have joined agricultural sustainability MSIs, then, notjust to perform inclusiveness and unity (Rajak 2011). More fundamentally, they needaccess to other stakeholders’ expertise and relationships. In the US-based Field toMarket, for instance, these include all the major supply chain actors – the commoditytraders (ADM, Cargill, etc.), the agricultural technology suppliers (Bayer Cropscience, Syn-genta), and commodity growers’ associations—as well as environmental NGOs (WWF, theNature Conservancy, Ducks Unlimited), several universities, and a few governmentagencies (such as the National Resource Conservation Service (NRCS)).

While some of these members joined mainly to influence how the industry defines sus-tainable agriculture, many have since ‘partnered’ with manufacturers to help them collectfarm-level data. Field to Market provides a precompetitive space to negotiate such part-nerships, which require commodity traders in particular to share what was traditionallyconsidered proprietary information. ‘If we want to be trusted [we] have to start liftingthe veil,’ one trading company sustainability manager explained, ‘Not that there is any-thing nefarious behind the veil, you just need to share some actual numbers and thatcauses indigestion with some folks.’ Sharing (and collecting) numbers also requires a lotof work which, these managers say, their downstream customers seem not to fully appreci-ate, and usually will not pay for. One manager noted how a major manufacturer had been‘begging us’ to collect data faster, ‘but they do not want to talk money.’ In short, manufac-turers’ need for more information about their raw materials has supply chain partnershipsmore common, but it has not made them easy.

The universities, government agencies, and some of the NGOs, meanwhile, are ‘affiliate’members of Field to Market, meaning they do not pay fees or have voting rights. Structu-rally they appear marginal. But Field to Market’s corporate members nonetheless dependon their participation, because their scientists understand the models which the organiz-ation uses to assess on-farm environmental impacts (in fact some of these models rundirectly off NRCS servers), and their extension agents know the farmers it seeks to

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assess. They appreciate why farmers may be reluctant to adopt certain conservation prac-tices, and know about government and university resources that might convince them todo so. The academics and other affiliate members, in other words, are not mere tokensbrought in to legitimate corporate decisions. Rather, corporate members have relied ontheir knowledge from the beginning. This reliance reflects a broader trend observed byagri-food scholars who have conducted research in and with companies (Biltekoff 2015):as corporations’ roles in food supply governance have broadened, they have increasinglylooked beyond corporate walls for advice and feedback (Schleifer and Penders 2011; Evans2015).

In this regard, large environmental NGOs are especially key players (Hyatt and Johnson2016). Besides their in-house scientific expertise, corporate sustainability initiatives rely ontheir skills as conveners, and their insights into the broader terrain of environmental andsocial activism. WWF, for example, founded many of the existing commodity roundtables;it also regularly consults for companies at the early stages of their sustainable sourcingprograms, to help them identify and prioritize supply chain risks. While these includelonger-term supply security risks, companies also look to WWF and other ‘partner’ NGOsto alert them to emergent reputational risks. As one manufacturer’s sustainabilitymanager said, ‘we try to work with them to say, “what do you see? What do you thinkneeds attention?” so that, hopefully, before that becomes a public issue we can starttaking steps to manage it.’ Another manager described NGOs acting as soundingboards; when his company is developing a position on a particular issue, ‘we tell themfirst to see, “what is it that you think?” Then we go to the marketplace.’ As one seniormanager noted, some NGOs have gotten very ‘savvy’ in playing these advisory roles;they know that they have to ‘deliver expertise, and deliver something that we do nothave, besides their credibility.’

That corporations depend on other stakeholders does not mean, of course, that powerand resource asymmetries do not influence how MSIs such as Field to Market operate.Rather, it means that, in these contexts, the relationships between different stakeholdersare themselves important but not predetermined sources of power. This underscores thevalue of examining such relationships empirically, rather than assuming that the presenceof corporations will determine their outcomes.

‘Do not tell them what to do’

Much of the practical work of agricultural sustainability MSIs centers around the toolsneeded to collect and analyze data about on-farm sustainability. ‘Tools’ refers here toan array of online platforms or spreadsheets, populated with questions. Examplesinclude the Fieldprint Calculator, the Cool Farm Tool, SISC’s metrics calculator, and SAI-Platform’s Farm Sustainability Assessment (FSA). As mentioned earlier, most of thesetools have been developed not to certify farmers’ compliance with standards, but ratherto quantify their performance on a set of key metrics, or indicators (the one partial excep-tion is SAI-Platform’s FSA, a 140-question survey that includes both practice-based andquantitative questions). All the tools both relay farmers’ data to certain downstream com-panies (in some cases in anonymized, aggregate form) and provide individual farmers withfeedback on how they perform on the different metrics. By allowing farmers to comparetheir numbers to regional benchmarks and track progress over time, these tools – like

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many other forms of metrics-based assessment in modern life (Beer 2016) – are supposedto encourage ongoing improvement.

Critiques of private governance note how industry-dominated MSIs tend to producetools that serve industry interests (Ponte 2014; Konefal, Hatanaka, and Constance 2017).Accordingly, Konefal, Hatanaka, and Constance (2017)’s analysis of Field to Market andSISC finds that their ‘relatively homogenous’ memberships have developed metrics thatprimarily measure eco-efficiency, i.e. GHG emissions or water use per bushel. Thesemetrics define progress as producing more with less, also known as sustainable intensifi-cation (Garnett et al. 2013). This ‘weak’ definition of sustainability (Thompson 2010) doesnot assure the integrity of broader ecosystems, but holds obvious appeal for companiesthat look to intensive agriculture as either a source of cheap raw materials or a marketfor their own agro-inputs. It also resonates with large environmental NGOs such as theNature Conservancy, which sees intensification as necessary to save wildlife while alsofeeding a growing world population (Jenkins 2018).

Eco-efficiency measures of agricultural sustainability are indeed more industry-friendlythan possible alternatives (Konefal, Hatanaka, and Constance 2017). But this level of analy-sis also does not reveal much about what went into their production. These MSIs’ internaldiscussions about their metrics reveal a more complex set of concerns than simply main-taining business as usual (which, for many of the participating companies, has not gone sowell lately). Here I focus on two. The first concern is to be credible, and in particular to havecredible evidence of continuous improvement. The second, somewhat at odds with thefirst, is to not be prescriptive or intrusive.

Credibility is a major theme in these MSIs’ portrayal of their metrics and related tools.They emphasize that their metrics generate quantitative evidence of ‘outcomes’ (i.e.reduced GHG emissions, water conserved) rather than assuming that only certain practicesproduce those outcomes (SISC n.d.). SISC’s website boasts case studies of ‘Success stories,backed up by real data.’ A Field to Market promotional video tells companies, ‘Don’t just tellyour sustainability story. Show it with the Fieldprint Calculator’ (Field to Market 2016a). OneField toMarket participant said getting data that could demonstrate ‘impact on the ground’appealed to the organization’s corporate members. ‘I think what a lot of companies reallyhunger for is… to really be able to talk about the result of their work and not just the factthat 100 percent of the farmers that they are working with have adopted a certain practice.’

Corporate sustainability managers echo this point. Wherever they talk about their work– companies’ annual reports, disclosures to the various ‘rater and ranker’ agencies, conver-sations with NGOs, websites or social media – quantitative evidence of impact is eitherrequired or at least desirable. Hard numbers about reductions in water use or fertilizerrunoff could help them avoid accusations of greenwash, and prove that any particular nar-rative was, as one manager put it, ‘not just a fluff piece.’ Even if those numbers were of nouse in labeling, she said, they could be woven into the stories about farmers posted on acompany’s web site, offering valuable ‘proof points.’ Not least, that data can reinforce sus-tainability managers’ credibility within their own workplaces, helping them prove to seniorexecutives that their work has impacts even if they do not appear on a company’s profitand loss statements. Those executives, observed one consultant, do not care about ‘abunch of anecdotes;’ they want to see numbers.

While sustainability managers want those numbers to show improvement – i.e. that thefarmers in a particular sourcing region have measurably reduced their water use or

THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 11

nitrogen runoff per bushel of crop – they emphasize that they do want to dictate tofarmers how it should happen. This is another selling point of metrics-based tools:unlike many standards, they do not prescribe practices, at least not overtly. MSIs suchas Field to Market and SISC play up this point; as SISC’s website says, ‘by focusing on out-comes instead of practices, individual operators are free to innovate and find the practicesthat work best for them’(SISC).

Sustainability managers often mention the concern not to be prescriptive even if theircompanies source products or key ingredients through contract relationships (formal orotherwise) that are by definition prescriptive. Supermarkets’ relations with their freshproduce and ‘own brand’ goods suppliers are familiar examples (Harvey 2007; Ouma2010), but not unique. Fast food retailers such as McDonald’s also maintain long-term,more or less direct relations with producers of key raw materials, as do some manufac-turers (i.e. PepsiCo’s relations with potato growers fit this model; so do Campbell’s relationswith tomato growers). Even if such companies have long required the raw materials them-selves to meet precise size and varietal standards, their sustainability managers emphasizethat they prefer to ‘work with’ suppliers rather than impose standards on them (whichdoes not mean this never happens). Prescribing practices, said one manager, leads tofarmers who are ‘just driven by the audit,’ while not necessarily making measurableimprovements.

In supply chains where manufacturers buy commodity ingredients from trader-pro-cessor companies such as Cargill and ADM, corporations’ capacity to require specific prac-tices of farmers is limited at best. This might seem surprising given the commodity traders’sizable shares of national and international grain markets (Murphy, Burch, and Clapp 2012).But their sustainability managers emphasize that their companies’ one-off transactionswith farmers limits what they can know about much less ask of them. As one said, ‘thefarmers are independent. They are going to grow things the way that they see fit.’ Tech-nological changes have, moreover, increased farmers’ independence, at least vis-à-visthe trading companies. Farmers’ home computers and cell phones have eroded thetraders’ once-privileged access to information access, while on-farm storage (up 25percent in 15 years) has reduced farmers’ dependence of the traders’ ownmassive facilities(Bunge 2017; Meyer 2017; Parker and Blas 2018). The proliferation of bioethanol pro-cessors, meanwhile, has given corn growers an alternative market for their corn, onethat often offers better prices while asking fewer questions. None of this means thatsuch growers are unaffected by corporate consolidation in the agricultural input industryor corporate investment in agricultural real estate (Clapp 2018; Mckinstry 2018). It simplymeans that they are under no obligation to cooperate with the downstream agri-food cor-porations that would like them to adopt certain practices, including the sharing of data.Thus those companies’ sustainability managers must, in their interactions with growers,avoid what Field to Market participants often refer to as ‘thou shalts.’ ‘Talk to them likeyou are just friends,’ one manager advised; ‘also do not tell them what to do.’

Those managers must also try not to intrude, meaning that they should not take up toomuch of farmers’ time or compromise their privacy. Metrics-based tools address thisconcern with mixed success. While the MSIs promote their platforms as convenient anduser-friendly, a perennial meeting topic is how to ease farmers’ survey fatigue. Companiesin Field to Market typically send field agents to help farmers fill out the Fieldprint Calcu-lator, at least the first time, to make sure they complete it and do not enter too much

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of what one agent called ‘dirty’ data. The MSIs also describe their tools as secure, but par-ticipants admit that farmers’ fears about whomight get access to their data remain a majorobstacle (Freidberg, under review). Most of the MSIs can, however, promise farmers thatthey will not be subject to the kind of audits required for many agricultural certifications.In other words, no one will come to their farms to verify the accuracy of whatever data theyentered into a particular tool. Instead (at least in the case of Field to Market) any data ver-ification happens at the corporate level, and at the corporations’ expense. From the begin-ning, participating growers’ associations have made clear that their own membersconsider this a non-negotiable condition: alongside no ‘thou shalts,’ no audits.

Despite efforts to be neither prescriptive nor intrusive, data collection has gone moreslowly than anticipated. Tellingly, the companies in Field to Market (the only MSI examinedhere that reports on these numbers) were collecting data on only 2.8 million acres of USfarmland as of late 2017, from around 2000 farmers, whereas three years prior they had seta collective goal of 50 million acres by 2020. Another perennial meeting topic, then, is howto improve the ‘value proposition’ so that farmers find it worthwhile to share data andotherwise cooperate with companies’ sustainability initiatives. While paying them perbushel premiums has proven effective (Bentlage et al. 2016), companies generallyprefer not to pay extra for ingredients that are not bound for premium-priced products.But beyond the problem of scarce data is the problem of what the data can say. Atsome of the companies that now have several years worth farm-level data, sustainabilitymanagers are unsure. By now they have many stories of individual farmers who haveadopted specific conservation practices and seen measurable improvements. But willcompanies be able to point to broader improvement trends in their sourcing regions,much less claim that their data collection has helped drive those trends? One managerwas doubtful. ‘There is a lot of grey, and the grey for big food companies equals risk.’He was referring to the risk of greenwash accusations by NGOs looking to ‘make asplash.’ But another Field to Market participant mentioned the possibility that ‘You lookat the numbers and they do not show what you hoped’ – i.e. improvement. This isperhaps the most basic risk of a data-driven approach to sustainability governance: ifless prescriptive than other approaches, it might also prove simply ineffectual.

Conclusions

In her 2016 JPS commentary, Harriet Friedmann remarked,

Since 2005, when I first noticed the dance of creativity and appropriation between socialinitiatives and agrifood capitals, it has become increasingly clear that capital is very cleverindeed. Corporations can hire the best writers and imagemakers and use the internet andpublic meetings to capture ideas, words and even (yes) practices emerging from socialinitiatives.

Corporations have certainly adopted some of the words and ideas associated with‘alternative’ sustainable agriculture movements, and now promote some of their practices.Although the MSIs examined started with basic eco-efficiency metrics, some have sincedeveloped metrics for habitat conservation and soil health. Some of their corporatemembers have helped found the Midwestern Row Crop Collaborative (https://midwestrowcrop.org/), which aims to improve water quality and soil health, and the even

THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 13

newer Soil Health Partnership (http://soilhealthpartnership.org/). While these MSIs merit asmuch critical scrutiny as any other (soil health no doubt represents a commercial opportu-nity for some participants), they illustrate that the dance Friedmann described continues.

Joining such initiatives is just one way that Big Food companies have invested in knowl-edge and expertise that previously seemed unnecessary. This paper only exists, in fact,thanks to many (if not all) companies’ new interest in scholars’ perspective on theirwork. But despite increasing knowledge and reflexivity, companies still need the help ofothers, and still sometimes embark on projects that turn out to be misdirected if notimpossible. The public relations skills of the ‘best writers and imagemakers,’ as Friedmannput it, cannot by themselves compensate for too little data, much less drive the improve-ments in on-farm sustainability that the data may or may not reveal. Capital may be clever,but it is not infallible. Thinking about corporate sustainability initiatives as assemblageshelps us appreciate the contingent and unrehearsed nature of their governance projects,just as an STS perspective draws attention to the technologies and knowledge theydeploy, albeit not always effectively.

Friedmann’s dance metaphor offers useful guidance for analyzing not just agriculturalsustainability MSIs, but Big Food projects of reinvention more broadly. It suggests empiri-cal questions about (among other things) who companies seek to partner with, and why;which tools and practices have legs, and where; and how companies explain and other-wise attempt to recover from their own missteps. It also underscores how corporationsare actively trying to figure out what steps to take next. For critical agri-food scholars,this implies that their sustainability initiatives deserve at least as much attention as alterna-tive food movements have long received (Evans 2015). As in this other research tradition,this means thinking strategically about points of leverage and potential allies, and abouthow to not just expose failings, but also perhaps help address them.

Acknowledgements

I owe thanks to Julie Guthman and other members of the Radcliffe Institute agri-food writing groupfor reading an early draft, and to four anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. I amalso indebted to the many interviewees who shared their time and insights.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

The research for this article was supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, Award#1456910.

Notes on contributor

Susanne Freidberg is a professor of geography at Dartmouth College. Her research examines con-temporary cultural and technoscientific changes in corporate agri-food supply chains. She is theauthor of French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age (Oxford, 2004)and Fresh: A Perishable History (Harvard, 2009).

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