It’s too early to predict how COVID-19 will reshape the future. The travel, entertainment, hospitality and personal-services sectors have already been devastated. A Canadian Federation of Independent Business survey found that 32% of owners who had shut down their businesses in March were unsure if they would ever reopen.

The media has also identified the first winners of this global reckoning. Setting aside for a moment the immeasurable personal tragedies caused by the virus, here are some preliminary results:

• Greater concern for the environment could be COVID’s legacy, wrote columnist Gwynne Dyer. “The clean air over China’s cities in the past month, thanks to an almost total shutdown of the big sources of pollution, has saved 20 times as many Chinese lives as COVID-19 has taken . . . People will remember this when the filthy air comes back and want something done about it.”

• Movements for social change may be empowered by governments’ rapid moves to restrict behaviour and unleash financial support. At TheConversation.com, U.K. economist Simon Mair said the virus “is expanding the economic imagination. As governments and citizens take steps that three months ago seemed impossible, our ideas about how the world works could change rapidly.”

• Retail and food workers are finally getting some respect, with companies such as Maple Leaf Foods, Loblaw, Sobeys, Metro and Walmart granting raises to frontline staff, introducing the concept of “hero pay.” Though Corporate Knights asks whether $2 extra an hour is enough for the grocery employees putting their lives on the line. Canadian banks are giving frontline employees an extra $50 a day and additional paid time off; TD Bank Group is giving bonuses of up to $1,000.

• Tycoons such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Ma and Elon Musk, in most cases, polished their reputations by funding hospitals, medical supplies and research. But the Canadian billionaire community, wrote the Toronto Star’s David Olive, “has hardly been heard from on arguably the greatest crisis Canada has ever faced.”

• Manufacturers of everything from hockey skates to gin began retooling to deliver personal protective equipment to those who need it most. Heavyweights that have stepped up include H&M, Ford, GM, Dyson and Gucci’s parent company, Kering. Several companies have been saluted for establishing COVID relief funds, including Facebook, which set up a US$100 million relief fund for businesses in 30 countries, and meal-delivery companies, whose services helped thousands of restaurants stay open. Facebook also set up an additional US$100 million fund to support news media. Sony, Netflix and Amazon created their own US$100 million global relief funds — though striking Amazon employees say not enough is being done to keep them safe.

And then there are the hidden heroes: the workers delivering essential services across dozens of sectors, as well as anyone who is stepping up to support aging relatives during the crisis, check up on their neighbours, shop for the quarantined, donate money or haul canned goods to food banks. We’re banging on our pots and pans in thanks for you, too.

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You’d be wrong.

A new study of 200 of the world’s biggest brands found that fewer than half of them show any signs of meeting the United Nations’ 2011 Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

Conducted by the UK non-profit Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB), the study mainly surveys companies in apparel, food and drink, resource extraction and technology manufacturing – the four industries considered most susceptible to compromising workers’ rights. The key finding: one in four companies received a score of 10% or less for their efforts to support human rights, activities that range from mere transparency on human-rights issues to establishing effective grievance mechanisms and holding board directors accountable for human-rights issues.

With an estimated 25 million people today working as forced labour, business clearly has to work harder to expunge its supply chains of people and organizations that consider human rights an optional frill.

The survey results look only slightly better when you distinguish between the performance of 100 companies being studied for the third time and 100 new companies added to the survey this year. The 100 original firms, knowing they’re under scrutiny, showed real progress, moving from an average score of 18% in 2017 to almost 32% in 2019. But the new 100 companies posted an average score of just 17%.

“In aggregate, the 200 companies are painting a distressing picture,” noted CHRB chair Steve Waygood. “That one quarter of companies score less than 10%, and a full half of companies fail to meet any of the five basic criteria for human-rights due diligence, should alarm governments and investors.”

Danone, Diageo, Heineken, Kellogg and Pepsi are among the companies that showed the most improvement since 2017. The laggards, with the lowest scores overall, include Costco, Phillips 66, Western Digital, Broadcom, Lindt chocolate, Monster Beverage and Canadian firms Loblaw and Alimentation Couche-Tard.

Most companies will likely continue to underplay human rights until they’re forced to change, whether by public exposure or by increasing pressure from activists, shareholders, investors and governments.

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As the largest food retailer, Loblaw interacts with one-third of Canadian consumers from coast-to-coast. This places them in a strong position to lead change throughout the entire retail industry. “This includes our commitment to responsible sourcing of seafood sold in our 1000-plus retail locations, by the end of 2013,“ says Melanie Agopian, Senior Director, Sustainability, Loblaw Companies. “Source with Integrity is one of our five corporate responsibility (CSR) principles driving the way we do business, across the entire supply chain,” she added.

As Galen Weston, the Executive Chairman of Loblaw sees it, this commitment to influence market and industry change is more than a business opportunity for Loblaw. The issue of sustainable seafood is something that needs to see immediate change for future development too.

In spite of Loblaw’s market reach, their whole systems approach to sustainable seafood cannot be achieved without partnerships. That is where WWF-Canada comes into play.

“WWF-Canada has provided conservation and environmental technical expertise on sustainable seafood,” Agopian says. “They also have a diverse and global network from which to pull additional resources and expertise, and a great deal of experience driving transformational industry change.”

Call to action

The big issue that both partners are working to address is the devastating ecological and economic crisis created by a significant and growing decline in fish stocks. WWF points out that our oceans were once considered an inexhaustible source of food, but due to overfishing and poor management our oceans are now in a state of global crisis.

“The failure to adequately invest in recovery and sustainable use of fisheries negatively impacts its associated environment, social and economic benefits,” says Hadley Archer, VP, Strategic Partnerships & Development WWF-Canada. The World Bank and FAO – the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations – estimate that losses from inefficient fisheries amount to $50 billion annually, with the cumulative loss over the past three decades being around $2 trillion. “These numbers represent recoverable losses with exports worth more than $85 billion in 2008, and related economic activity generated in the range of $500 billion per year,” he says.

Closer to home, Atlantic Canada could recover losses estimated at a billion dollars annually with adequate investment in recovery. WWF and Loblaw, together with fishing industry, are working to do just that.

A coordinated response

As a retail giant, Loblaw’s access to marketing tools, global vendor networks, and overall company scope grants unique accessibility to a new market that WWF is not accustomed to. Likewise for Loblaw, being able to harness the expertise that WWF offers has been integral to designing an effective program.

“For WWF, a big advantage of partnering with Loblaw on this important project is that we can actually accelerate the achievement of measurable results, and create a new benchmark on how private sector business can work collaboratively with organizations and groups with complementary expertise – aligned around shared transformational goals”, says Steven Price, Conservation Science Director at WWF-Canada.

When working with government alone to address the overfishing issue, WWF was not seeing sufficient movement. It was clear that WWF had to engage with the private sector if they wanted to see more tangible results.

To illustrate how influential private sector companies are and why they need to get more actively involved in this market transformation: 300-500 companies control 70% or more of the trade of the world’s most essential commodities. “If these companies demand sustainable products, they’ll pull 40-50% of production with them”, says Jason Clay, Senior Vice President, Market Transformation, WWF-US.

If ten percent of those 300-500 companies were to think differently about how they source seafood, and worked in collaboration with the fishing industry and environmentalists to seek alternatives, a transformation of the market would already be underway.

In order to be a leader in today’s increasingly competitive markets, sustainable business plans and projects influencing environmental platforms can deliver a major advantage. As Canada’s largest food distributor with more than 1,000 corporate and franchise stores nation-wide, the impact Loblaw can have – on consumer attitudes and decisions and as a model for other industries in leveraging their sustainable practices – is enormous.

Measuring success

“Our seafood initiative also brings certified seafood to the Loblaw stores that meet the standards of the MSC (Marine Stewardship Council) for all of their seafood-affiliated products, from fresh to canned fish, and non-seafood products with fish ingredients such as pet food”, says WWF-Canada’s Conservation Director, Steven Price.

MSC standards and certification requirements ensure that only seafood from a certified sustainable fishery is sold with the MSC eco-label and meet best practice guidelines for certification and eco-labeling.

Another integral sustainable seafood collaborator is Loblaw’s Marine Scientific Advisor, Dr. Jeff Hutchings from Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia. Dr. Hutchings has helped in successfully identifying sustainable seafood for Loblaw counters and has contributed insight into the fishing industry and at risk species.

“We live in the country with the longest coastline in the world and our rich heritage in fishing extends back more than 500 years,” Hutchings says. “As Canadians, we cannot afford to ignore our collective responsibility to recover the health of what lives in the oceans.”

Through the development of Sustainable Seafood Sourcing Criteria, and the expertise of WWF and Dr. Hutchings, Loblaw aims to evaluate the sustainability of species in order to better serve their customers with responsibly sourced and sustainable seafood. Progress updates are captured in both the annual Loblaw CSR Report and Sustainable Seafood Commitment Report.

De-listing at-risk products

Through the sustainable seafood initiative, Loblaw companies successfully identified products they had been carrying that did not comply with MSC standards. Dr. Hutchings’ expertise also allowed Loblaw to identify ‘at-risk’ species, and where and how to make changes to their CoC (chain-of-custody) certified seafood counters.

Since this collaboration, Loblaw has made changes to their seafood counters. In 2009, Shark, Skate, Orange Roughy, and Chilean Sea Bass were delisted from stores. More recently, in 2012, American red snapper was also delisted.

Delisted products do not just disappear from Loblaw’s counters. The goal is to bring Loblaw’s customers along on the journey – to engage, educate, and build new levels of customer loyalty. To make a powerful visual statement to consumers, Loblaw displays their removed at-risk and unsustainable fish with empty containers in the fresh seafood section, with suggested alternatives.

Loblaw is actively shaping a new way of purchasing seafood, one that is sustainable, and promotes knowledge behind the sourcing of fish stock. With the power of collaboration and multiple forces, Loblaw aims to source sustainable products and bring them back to customers in stores once they are confident the sourcing is transparent.

The flexible and collaborative nature of this partnership makes it a successful model for driving positive environmental and economic change. When Canada’s largest grocery retailer commits to healthy oceans and sustainable fishing practices, it is clear that long-term profitability is not at odds with environmental sustainability.

To view the complete collaboration series, click here.

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