GREENSBORO, N.C. — Syngenta launched its Good Growth Plan seven years ago with six sustainability targets to be met by 2020 and has now entered the next phase of the program.
The original Good Growth Plan provided the following targets which focused on boosting resource efficiency, rejuvenating ecosystems and strengthening rural communities:
• Make crops more efficient: Increase average productivity of the world's major crops by 20% without using more land, water or inputs.
• Rescue more farmland: Improve the fertility of 10 million hectares of farmland on the brink of degradation.
• Help biodiversity flourish: Enhance biodiversity on 5 million hectares of farmland.
• Empower smallholders: Reach 20 million smallholders and enable them to increase productivity by 50%.
• Help people stay safe: Train 20 million farm workers on labor safety, especially in developing countries.
• Look after every worker: Strive for fair labor conditions throughout our entire supply chain network.
“I think we all agree that sustainability is a journey. That it’s something of a continuum rather than a kind of one-and-done exercise after you arrive at a particular destination,” Chris Davison, Syngenta North America head of business sustainability, said at the company’s media summit.
“And certainly that’s our philosophy at Syngenta, but it’s also premised on things like continuous improvement, measurement and quantification and a number of other considerations, as well. And like other organizations, Syngenta is on a sustainability journey.
“Now that first Syngenta Good Growth Plan was an important step forward in making sustainability commitments and delivering on them, which we were largely able to do. And that is no small achievement and one that should be celebrated by all who helped us to make that a reality for agriculture.”
Since Syngenta first developed the Good Growth Plan, the challenges, opportunities and expectations have changed and grown, placing even more of a premium on the ability to grow more crops while using fewer inputs — natural or synthetic — coping with volatile weather and meeting the demand for more food of higher quality.
Global Outreach
“To help navigate this evolving landscape, we decided to talk to some of our stakeholders, be that governments, food companies, consumers, NGOs, farmers and others. And we did this through two sets of outreach, one in the fall of 2018 and the other in early 2020,” Davison said.
A global survey of large-scale farmers in five countries, including the United States, was also conducted.
“Now you can imagine looking at growers across countries around the world will yield a bunch of different perspectives and results, but there were also some commonalities that came out of that research we did,” Davison noted.
“Four out of five farmers surveyed believe that climate change has had at least some impact on their ability to grow food, and certainly most believed that reducing greenhouse gas emissions would make their farms more financially stable or competitive.
“Interestingly many U.S. farmers reported to us that they have already taken action to do just that, to start to progress, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“They talked specifically about practices related to carbon management and they also highlighted the important role of technology to help them to continue to improve in this space.”
Next Generation
With the feedback and perspectives, Syngenta launched the next generation Good Growth Plan which includes the following new commitments and targets for 2025:
• Accelerate innovation for farmers and nature: Farmers large and small face increasing challenges and changing views of society. Syngenta is accelerating innovation to help overcome those challenges through investing $2 billion in sustainable agriculture breakthroughs, two new sustainable technology breakthroughs a year and striving for the lowest residues in crops and the environment.
• Strive for carbon neutral agriculture: To combat changes in the environment, Syngenta is working with farmers to reduce carbon dioxide capture in soil and improve biodiversity. This effort includes measuring and enabling carbon capture and mitigation in agriculture, enhancing biodiversity and soil health on 7.4 million acres of rural farmland every year and reducing the carbon intensity of operations by 50% by 2030.
• Help people stay safe and healthy: Syngenta's products must be made, transported and used in a safe way. The company takes responsibility for stewardship from the factories to he farms through goal zero incidents in Syngenta's operations, train 8 million farm workers on safe use every year and strive for fair labor across our entire supply chain.
• Partnering for impact: Building the company's rich network of strategic sustainability partnerships and working to increase the impact they can make together by building cohesive partnerships and publish their sustainability objectives, launching innovation dialogues for inclusive consultation on sustainability and have board level governance of sustainability.