Message From Our CEO

In a world where sustainability issues have accelerated, expectations and regulation for responsible business practices and supply chains are increasing, as consumers expect purchase decisions to support environmental conservation and socioeconomic development, protecting people and planet.

Our leadership position enables us to influence our value chains toward positive and sustainable change, presenting both opportunities and challenges that we firmly believe can and should be addressed through increased collaboration among all value chain stakeholders. While we can and must act individually, securing broad and lasting impact requires a concerted effort to find fair and shared solutions to common challenges.

Environmental Stewardship

Achieving the world’s climate goals to limit global warming critically depends on driving more sustainable food and agricultural production and consumption.

Recognizing the key role we have to play in this endeavor, in 2022 we went beyond the sectoral roadmap announced at COP27, with our Group-wide commitment to eliminate deforestation and conversion of native vegetation of high conservation value for agricultural purposes from all our supply chains by the end of 2025, adopting deforestation and native vegetation conversion reference dates for palm, soy and other commodities.

As an important basis to fulfill this commitment through responsible sourcing decisions, we have continued to drive traceability and engage with farmers in our supply chains to safeguard natural resources – such as soil, biodiversity and water – through more sustainable land use.

Advancing with our decarbonization journey, we also pushed ahead with groundwork for science-based, near-term target-setting for Scope 1 and 2 emissions reductions of 33.6% by 2030, compared to our 2022 baseline year. Announced in 2023, this target is aligned with Science-Based Targets initiative criteria and consistent with the Paris Agreement goal to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. We also launched a range of studies to better understand our Scope 3 emissions and will submit related data to CDP later this year.

I am also pleased to report that we exceeded our preexisting five-year targets (2018-2022) across all four of our environmental key performance indicators: greenhouse gas emissions, electricity and energy consumption, water usage and solid waste sent to landfill.

Social Responsibility

While we seek to conserve the natural resources on which we all depend, our efforts also focus on the many people working for and with us: employees and contractors working at our facilities and beyond, but also our suppliers and partners in thousands of communities connected with our business activities, whose production is the heart of food and agricultural systems.

As ever, a top priority is health and safety, and I am therefore delighted to report that 2022 was another record year in terms of safety performance indexes, with the lowest ever reported accident frequency and gravity rates at LDC. This strong result was thanks to the sustained efforts of our Safety, Health & Environment (SHE) teams, record investment into SHE enhancements and awareness campaigns, and of course, the diligence of every person at our sites in working safely, adopting healthy habits and acting for the environment.

Our efforts to create a more inclusive workplace also continued to take shape, with the completed global roll-out of our inclusive recruitment standard, ongoing HR and employee training, and multiple workplace wellbeing initiatives.

We also continued to support local initiatives to empower farming communities around the world, working alongside various partners and expert organizations. An important focus remains to train smallholder farmers on more sustainable agricultural methods, driving the adoption of regenerative agriculture techniques to increase their yields and incomes sustainably, with positive impacts for their broader community.

In line with our commitment to upholding human rights, LDC also became a member of the ILO Child Labour Platform, a leading initiative aiming to eradicate child labor in supply chains. ​This membership builds on the strong principles and codes that guide our company in relation to fair labor practices and zero tolerance for child and forced labor.

Group Governance

Recognizing that strong governance is key to good corporate citizenship, we continue to reinforce the framework that supports sustainable business practices. This included our financing strategy and model, through several new sustainability-linked credit facilities in 2022, as well as our data security program.

We also began work toward a Group-wide responsible sourcing policy and grievance protocol, building on the principles laid out in LDC’s Group Code of Conduct and several existing commodity-specific policies and codes, which formalize our conviction that there is only one way to do business: ethically.

Responsible Business

Throughout 2022 we also made many positive strides in specific supply chains, outlined in detail in the Responsible Business section of this report.

Key highlights, among many others, include the launch of LDC’s five-year sustainability strategy and Responsible Sourcing Program for coffee, successful freight biofuel trials, advances for supply chain traceability and deforestation-free verification protocols in palm and soy, training on sustainable farming practices delivered to tens of thousands of cotton farmers, and the Group’s first sustainability-linked credit line including both environmental and social KPIs for our juice business.

Future in Focus

As the world’s population continues to grow, the need to drive more sustainable food and agricultural systems will also grow – in importance and urgency.

At LDC, we believe we have both a duty and a vital role to play in shaping a fair and sustainable future, through continued action to reduce our environmental footprint, empower and protect the people working for and with us, and set standards for responsible practices and behaviors – within the company and in our wider value chains.

We will continue our work in this sense in 2023 and beyond: aligning governance of Group finances, data management and procurement with sustainability goals; driving supply chain transparency as a foundation for responsible sourcing decisions; accelerating our decarbonization journey to contribute to global climate goals; engaging with farmers and value chain stakeholders to foster more sustainable production practices and eliminate deforestation for agricultural purposes; and of course, continuing to prioritize the safety and wellbeing of our teams worldwide, who are critical to our success.

We are now building on the important groundwork undertaken in 2022 to reassess and align our sustainability strategy and framework to critical environmental, social and governance issues, and look forward to communicating the outcomes of this process in due course.

I am confident that LDC will continue to make good progress on this front, and I would like to thank our people across the world for the efforts they have made in 2022 – and continue making daily – to realize our ambitions while creating fair and sustainable value, for the benefit of current and future generations.

Michael Gelchie
Chief Executive Officer