Helping ensure food security for 9 billion people is a big opportunity that comes with big obligations. As a leading agribusiness and food company, Bunge works actively to ensure that the approaches our industry takes to meet this challenge consider economic, environmental and social implications.
Carl Hausmann, who leads Bunge's public policy and sustainability efforts, notes that crucial to this is "the dialogue with civil society, in which all participants in the food production chain bring their specific competencies and knowledge to the table to inform the right course of action."
For Bunge, productive dialogue has translated into action in several important areas, especially sustainable agriculture. We are a founding member of the Soy Working Group in Brazil, a partnership among industry, environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the Brazilian government that is developing approaches to better manage land use in the Amazon Biome. The group operates systems to monitor the expansion of soy crops in the area (the soy processing industry enacted a moratorium against buying soy from newly deforested areas in the Amazon in 2006), educates farmers on best practices and is working with the government to develop land zoning plans for the region and compensation mechanisms for environmental protection.