This guest post was written by Beth Keck, senior director of sustainability at Walmart.

Walmart customers—whether they live in Chicago or Tokyo—want locally grown fresh produce. Yet, while grocery sales make up more than half our business, we haven’t focused enough of our sustainability efforts toward the food we sell. We’ve set dozens of sustainability goals for the company during the past five years, but only four of our 39 public sustainability goals addressed food…A year ago, we realized we needed to do more, and it was clear sustainable agriculture was right for our business.

We began by mapping existing activities and, with retail locations in 15 countries, we discovered we already had some impressive sustainable agriculture initiatives underway. Our Central America business, for example, was leading the company with its direct farm model. We also learned that we needed to better understand the global agricultural trends affecting our business and find a way to involve our total enterprise in solutions.

The result—a few weeks ago we announced a comprehensive global commitment to sustainable agriculture that is now being implemented in every market where we operate.

Read the rest of this article at TreeHugger