Sustainable progress:
Nutreco’s springboard for the new decade

This is the tenth Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) report from Nutreco. Our first report, at the beginning of the decade, made Nutreco a pioneer in our market sector and our reporting activities (see inside back cover) have helped raise the profile of CSR and its relevance to our industry. It is appropriate in this tenth report, as we enter the next decade, that we are able to describe a significant advance in our long and sometimes challenging sustainability journey. In 2009, Nutreco made a strategic choice to embed sustainability throughout Nutreco operations. We began by formulating a sustainability policy, set targets for the managers and initiated a programme to facilitate the embedding process and ensure it is change that lasts.
 

Growing awareness

Over the past ten years CSR reporting has become commonplace among suppliers, competitors and customers. Throughout that time, sustainability has been an important component of our CSR approach. Gradually, as other aspects of corporate social responsibility, such as reputation and risk management, were brought into good order, sustainability emerged as the central concern. That status is emphasised by the challenge we all face of sustainably feeding the world in the coming decades. To mark the evolution, we are now reporting under the title of ‘sustainability’. It is important to note that we interpret the term sustainability to include harmony with our environment and having good relations with our employees, our neighbours and wider society as well as economic sustainability.

Reporting on these topics increased our awareness of issues relating to our activities, partly because it attracted attention from environmental and social pressure groups, trade bodies and regulators. Some of these contacts led us to enter constructive dialogues such as the Round Table on Responsible Soy and discussions with Peruvian fishmeal producers in efforts to make a difference in parts of the value chain where we have influence but not control. These activities also helped to shape the topics and programmes of the AquaVision and Agri Vision multi-stakeholder conferences that we organise alternately each year. We believe it is vital that all players in the value chains, from farmers to retailers, can come together and debate the options for successfully overcoming the obstacles in our path.

In turn, these conferences bring a wealth of fact and opinion that has helped shape our strategy and relationships with the wider world. Since they began in 1996, these conferences attracted over 4,000 delegates. In closing our Agri Vision conference in 2007, I estimated that three extra planets would be needed if nine billion people were to have a Western lifestyle while addressing the concerns of Europe on climate change, animal welfare and sustainability.

Read more