VIVESCIA launches its new sustainable development policy: 20 commitments to create the conditions for its future sucess
Climate change, the preservation of biodiversity, demographic pressure, global food security, and the energy and digital transitions….
Faced with these major, unprecedented challenges, VIVESCIA Cooperative Group is convinced that its grain agri-food businesses have a key role to play and are part of the solution today and moving forwards.
To go further and faster, and to create the conditions for the sustainable performance of its cooperative farmers, its employees, and wider society, the Group is reinventing and stepping up its sustainable development policy with 20 commitments and just as many objectives, indicators, and projects, most of which are already underway.
“Our singular position in the ecosystem of grain growers and processing industries, and our field-to-fork value chain are strengths, but they also give us responsibilities.
Our new sustainable development policy, LINK, expresses the true meaning of the VIVESCIA collective and the pride we all take in being part of it. It clarifies our corporate purpose and highlights the strength of our unique growth model. It consolidates our fundamental mission of feeding people, which is delivered every day by the farmers and employees of the VIVESCIA community. It will bring a new momentum that will flow through all our businesses and help them move faster on projects that are already underway.
LINK brings a new energy and feeds into our ambition: to create sustainable value and drive change and progress for society through our plant-based value chains and agri-food businesses. Our credibility, resilience and shared future depend on it.”
Christoph Büren, President of VIVESCIA Group
“Our singular position in the ecosystem of grain growers and processing industries, and our field-to-fork value chain are strengths, but they also give us responsibilities.
Our new sustainable development policy, LINK, expresses the true meaning of the VIVESCIA collective and the pride we all take in being part of it. It clarifies our corporate purpose and highlights the strength of our unique growth model. It consolidates our fundamental mission of feeding people, which is delivered every day by the farmers and employees of the VIVESCIA community. It will bring a new momentum that will flow through all our businesses and help them move faster on projects that are already underway.
LINK brings a new energy and feeds into our ambition: to create sustainable value and drive change and progress for society through our plant-based value chains and agri-food businesses. Our credibility, resilience and shared future depend on it.”
Christoph Büren, President of VIVESCIA Group
- A collective initiative born of a wide consultation - The fruit of collaborative work conducted throughout 2021, a widescale consultation with 180 internal and external stakeholders, and working groups with all our businesses, this new chapter in our sustainable development policy actively involves all VIVESCIA Group’s businesses, its Cooperative, its agricultural subsidiaries, and its processing businesses (VIVESCIA Industries) in an engaging strategic framework.
- A story of connections - Our policy, simply named LINK, evokes and conveys the connections that the Group creates every day. It is the very essence of VIVESCIA’s cooperative business model to make connections, share value, and create a collective. VIVESCIA creates, maintains, and cultivates ties with the regions it operates in, with the cooperative farmers who work the land, with its employees who look after and add value to the grain, with its food industry customers, and with consumers. In concrete terms, this new sustainable development policy is organised around three pillars: The Planet, People, and the Value Chain & the Land. It rests on a strong foundation of Cooperative governance and a sustainable business model.
- CSR governance – The key to our success and our credibility is a well-structured CSR governance team put in place at the Group level, including a CSR committee made up of elected members of the Board of administrators and employees representing each business line.
- VIVESCIA is already down to action – A new chapter means new initiatives and new projects, some of which have already been underway for several months or years: Proactive initiatives like the CARE programme, launched in 2016 to bolster employee health and safety, or efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions since 2015, as well as the signature of a three-year partnership with the association of French food banks. In the last year, a huge project has also been launched to create a shared foundation and language for the Group’s environmental policy. Finalised this spring, this Environmental Management Charter will apply to all its businesses and sites in France and abroad by the end of 2023. VIVESCIA is quantifying and organising its efforts. The Group is committed to innovation and progress by actively rolling out its sustainable development policy throughout its business model.
We cultivate links...
VIVESCIA'S CLIMATE COMMITMENT
The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is crucial in the fight against climate change, the first victims of which have been farmers who have been impacted severely by successive extreme weather events in recent years. The future of agriculture, and that of the Cooperative and of VIVESCIA group, depends on it. To respond to these challenges, VIVESCIA has made three commitments:
- To continue to reduce its direct greenhouse gas emissions: -20% between 2015 and 2025
The Group’s efforts, which began in 2015, have already enabled it to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 14% by optimising its energy consumption and decarbonising its energy mix. - Conducting a soil carbon storage and greenhouse gas emissions assessment of VIVESCIA farms by 2022
In April 2022, VIVESCIA began offering all cooperative farmers a free simplified carbon analysis that uses an appropriate, straightforward and accessible methodology developed by the Cooperative's agronomic teams in partnership with a regional startup. So far, nearly 1,500 diagnostics have been carried out. - Defining our climate strategy by autumn 2022 will facilitate our contribution to achieving carbon neutrality by 2050
Launched in autumn 2021, this cross-functional campaign conducted in conjunction with specialist consultants will conduct a robust assessment of our Scope 3 emissions and set a forward trajectory for our direct and indirect scopes for the period to 2050, set intermediate targets to be achieved by 2030, and monitor relevant indicators.
"VIVESCIA Group and its community of cooperative farmers and employees, are committed to a shared mission: to feed people. This original mission has progressively and naturally evolved to become a corporate responsibility to strengthen the links that connect the farmer and the consumer, to make them grow and flourish, and to produce healthy, sustainable food that has a positive impact. Faced with the climate, environmental, and societal challenges that lie ahead, it was evident that we needed a new, more structured, clearer policy, more in line with our strategy and our stakeholders’ expectations. This new policy is capable of being the vehicle for our ambitions, of creating a framework that is conducive to the achievement of serious, quantifiable objectives, and of enabling our value chains and businesses to rise to the climate and societal challenges that lie ahead" says Valérie Frapier, Director of CSR and External Relations.
Our 20 commitments, VIVESCIA in action
To find out more about LINK, VIVESCIA Group’s new sustainable development policy,
its commitments, and its concrete actions:
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