Gotta Love Walmart: Serving Food Deserts, Hiring Women in Brazil and Offering Free Healthcare

1. "Walmart announced that it will open between 275-300 stores serving the Department of Agriculture (USDA) designated food desert areas by 2016. These estimates are based on the company’s current real estate plans. These stores, in both urban and rural areas, will provide access to groceries for more than 800,000 people living in food deserts. Walmart made the announcement at the White House this week with First Lady Michelle Obama.

Since 2007, the company has opened 218 stores serving food deserts. The projected new and existing locations, totaling about 500 stores, will provide access to fresh and healthy food in more than 700 food deserts and will serve approximately 1.3 million people living in these areas. To be included in this figure, a person must both live in a USDA designated food desert area and be within one mile of an urban Walmart or within ten miles of a rural Walmart store."

2. "Unprecedented in the Brazilian retail market, Walmart Brazil launched a structured program aimed at hiring women to work in the construction of its new stores. The company will hire women trained through the Training Course for Women Bricklayers, promoted by city halls in partnership with the Department of Policies for Women (SPM) and the presidency.

A Sam’s Club in São Bernardo do Campo, in greater Sao Paulo, will be the first built using these women construction workers - around 50 female bricklayers will be hired for the project. By the end of the year, a total of 200 women will be employed by Walmart in cities that are building new stores and have professional training courses promoted by city halls and SPM."

3. "With back-to-school time just around the corner and kids still taking advantage of long days off from school, Sam’s Club is helping families by offering free children’s health and ID screenings across the country on Saturday, July 9, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Every Sam’s Club that has a pharmacy participated in the free screenings, which includes more than 500 locations in the U.S."

MP: For its ongoing humanitarian efforts and community service to enrich and empower low-income people around the world by: a) bringing fresh groceries to America's food deserts, b) empowering working women in Brazil, and c) providing free health care screenings to America's youth, I hereby nominate Walmart for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.  It has done more to lift people out of poverty than many of the past Peace Prize recipients like Mother Theresa, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Barack Hussein Obama, and the United Nations, combined.