By Eduardo Bastos, Bayer Sustainability Director for Latin America
Climate change, food security, and biodiversity are challenging issues facing humanity. In this context, agriculture plays a crucial role in developing solutions that balance the demand for food with the need for more efficient and sustainable production, preserving the biodiversity of natural resources.
As a company, we at Bayer are clear about our guiding principles: the vision "Health for All, Hunger for No One" and the purpose "Science for a Better Life." As a leader in the agricultural sector, we guide our operations based on three strategic pillars: Innovation, Digital Transformation, and Sustainability.
We are committed to building an agriculture that benefits farmers, consumers, and our planet. Therefore, in 2019 alone, we invested more than €2.3 billion in Research & Development, to continue offering customized solutions worldwide and meeting the key needs of our farming customers.
In this journey toward innovation, sustainability is an essential word, with a series of definitions. For us, it means three solid commitments to be fulfilled over the next ten years: helping to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in agriculture by 30%; reducing the environmental impact of technologies by 30%; and improving the lives of 100 million smallholder farmers globally, including Brazil as one of the world's agro-environmental powerhouses.
Reducing 30% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is too big a challenge for us to achieve alone, and therefore, collaboration is a key word in our vocabulary. In Brazil, we launched the Bayer Carbon Initiative, in partnership with Embrapa and producers, which aims to build a carbon capture model to increase sustainability in agribusiness and generate additional income for farmers. In the long term, the goal is to achieve a zero-carbon future for agriculture, to which Bayer is committed.
Partnerships to benefit farmers, consumers, and our planet
Increasingly, companies are partnering with governments, the nonprofit sector, and academia to join forces for a better life on our planet, ensuring that Earth's temperature rise doesn't exceed 1.5°C, the scientifically established limit to avoid climate catastrophe. Producers know that extremes like excessive rainfall and drought have become more frequent, and the accumulation of carbon dioxide is part of this problem.
Today, major companies around the world face the challenge of becoming carbon neutral in their operations, and governments, like them, are moving in this direction, positively impacting the global market. To make this happen faster, Bayer is focused on developing solutions and partnerships on three fronts: ABC, MRV, and Market.
ABC, as the name suggests, promotes Low Carbon Agriculture, a pioneering initiative in Brazil that for about 10 years has helped promote techniques for capturing carbon in crops, such as no-till farming, systems integration, crop rotation, and other practices. We're essentially talking about producing carbon, storing it in the soil, and keeping a good portion of it there.
MRV stands for Measurement, Reporting, and Verification and, in simple terms, consists of converting stored carbon into credits and then monetizing them (converting them into cash). To achieve this, we are investing heavily in cost reduction, methods that are easier to replicate, and, of course, accepted by science and the market.
The third pillar is to help foster the carbon market, both voluntary and regulated. We have no doubt that co-creation is the best path to supporting the construction of a regulated market in Brazil, without carbon taxation.
In the field, we've already launched the Bayer Carbon Initiative, with around 500 producers in 14 Brazilian states, to learn together. We have no doubt it will be an incredible journey. The Carbon Initiative is sustainability in practice, in Brazil and worldwide.
