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Our Link in the Supply Chain
ADM plays a distinct role in the farm-to-consumer supply chain. We trade, transport, store and process feedstocks – primarily corn, oilseeds, wheat and cocoa – into products for large food, feed, industrial and energy companies.
Historically, ADM has recognized our responsibility to manage the links of the chain that are under our control with integrity, and with full attention to safety and human rights, product quality and security, and the health of the environment. Throughout our history we have long nurtured partnerships with suppliers and customers on the adjacent links of the supply chain.
Today, we’re learning more about the links in the chain that extend before and after our direct control. Through a supply chain analysis – from the farm all the way to final product delivery – we’re identifying risks to the sustainability of our business and our environment.
While the supply chain looks a little different for each type of food, feed, fuel or bio-based chemical ingredient we make, the principles are the same. Here is an example of how we participate in the cocoa supply chain:
Building a sustainable cocoa supply chain
If you could follow a single cocoa bean from the moment it was harvested by a farmer in Cote d’Ivoire until it met its destiny in a spoonful of irresistible chocolate soufflé at a London restaurant, you would meet many people along the way: the farmer who harvested the cocoa pod and dried the bean; the local broker who bought the bean, consolidated it with millions of others and prepared it for export; the shipper who handed the bean off to a processor, who roasted it, ground it and sold it to another processor, who in turn converted it into a fine chocolate and sold it to a restaurant, whose pastry chef created a soufflé to the delight of a diner who consumed the transformed bean and paid, ultimately, for the effort of everyone else in the chain, including a tip for the waiter.
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2007 Highlights
- We chartered a Sustainability Steering Committee to ensure that business decisions reflect the long-term good of our Company, our stockholders and the environment.
- We launched a supply chain analysis.
- We continue to support a moratorium on soy grown in the Amazon Biome – the Brazilian rainforest and related ecosystems – to reconfirm our opposition to clearing land and planting crops in environmentally sensitive areas.
- We added our Company signature to Brazil’s National Pact for the Eradication of Slave Labor to reaffirm ADM’s long-standing opposition to slavery and other abuses of basic human rights.
- We affirmed our Company’s commitment to responsible palm oil through our membership in the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil.
- We continue our active membership in the World Cocoa Foundation and the International Cocoa Initiative. These organizations are leading the cocoa industry’s efforts to promote a sustainable global cocoa economy.
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Altogether, the chocolate business involves 40-50 million people worldwide. Each one has a responsibility to make sure that his or her link in the chain is safe, free from environmental degradation, and respects the rights, health and dignity of everyone else in the supply chain. Interconnected agricultural and industrial supply chains with those characteristics are sustainable, that is, they should remain productive generation after generation and reward each participant appropriately.
As you tracked that single cocoa bean, you would not meet any ADM people at the start of the chocolate chain because ADM doesn’t directly own or operate cocoa farms. And ADM is rarely found at the retail end of the chain; rather we make our living along the middle links. We buy some crops directly from grower cooperatives and others from brokers. In our business, this is called originating or sourcing. We also store, trade, transport and process crops into intermediary products that become ingredients for finished products that are made and marketed by other companies.
In the case of the chocolate chain, we’re reaching all the way to remote villages in West Africa to help establish programs for teaching sustainable agricultural practices, building communities, improving worker health and safety, promoting responsible labor management and encouraging farmers to send their children to school. Read our Cocoa Sustainability Brochure.
ADM Supports Responsible Cocoa Farming
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