Bunge is the first global commodity exporter to achieve 100% traceability and monitoring of its direct and indirect soy purchases in priority regions of the Cerrado biome in Brazil. Priority regions at risk of deforestation in the Cerrado include the Brazilian states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí, Bahia and Mato Grosso. With the support of satellite monitoring, the company achieved 100% tracking and monitoring of its indirect supply chain in October, replicating the success reached with its direct purchases of soy in 2020. Direct purchases are commodities the company buys directly from farmers, while indirect purchases are purchased from local grain resellers.
Achieving traceability in the indirect value chain is one of the sector's main challenges. Bunge accomplished this thanks to its Sustainable Partnership, a program that fosters socio-environmental governance in the soy value chain. Since 2021, this initiative has shared knowledge, methodologies and tools with cooperatives and grain resellers to support them in structuring their own traceability, monitoring and supplier verification systems. Today, more than 90 resellers participate in the initiative in Brazil, a third of them are located in the priority regions, covering around 2,000 properties (more than 2 million hectares).
"We are proud to reach this major milestone in our ten-year journey to achieve traceable and verifiable supply chains so that we reach our zero-deforestation goal in 2025. Reconciling the development of agriculture with the preservation of the environment depends on a collective journey and we are pleased to be a leader in working with other stakeholders in the industry,” said Rossano de Angelis Jr., Bunge's vice president of Agribusiness in South America.
The Sustainable Partnership program provides resellers with access to the LYRA platform from the agtech company Vega Monitoramento. The program offers access to verification systems, such as satellite and farm-scale images, remote sensing, artificial intelligence, and structured data to advance traceability and monitoring and perform the socio-environmental diagnosis of agricultural properties. Bunge's continued partnership with Vega also provides that a technical team from Vega will be specially dedicated to serving grain resellers, from providing support on using the tool to training on best practices for assessing socio-environmental compliance in the production chain.
"With the success of the program, we agreed with our technology partner, Vega, to make the tool available to other companies in the sector, so that they can also have their indirect supply chains tracked and monitored. We believe in the power of collaboration and reiterate our commitment to continue to promote advanced sustainability standards and approaches in our sector," added Rossano.
A key element of the LYRA platform is data governance and confidentiality. Each company using the system has individual access rights. The system issues a compliance report in response to the query related to origination volumes according to each company's origination criteria, but the individual data elements of each farm/property are preserved. The information processed by the LYRA platform is audited by Bureau Veritas and the information security controls are IS0 27001 certified.
