MOSCOW (MRC) -- BASF Agricultural Solution’s senior vice-president for regulatory, sustainability and public affairs, Dirk Voeste, talks with Sanjiv Rana, editor-in-chief at IHS Markit's Crop Science News Reporting (formerly Agrow), to discuss the company’s outlook on sustainable solutions, digital agriculture and stewardship, said Chemweek.
BASF recently set itself “clear and measurable” targets to boost sustainable agriculture by 2030. That includes its Agricultural Solutions division increasing its sales share of “Accelerator” products – those with a “substantial sustainability contribution” – by 7% annually. The targets also include BASF bringing digital technologies to more than 400 million ha of farmland and helping farmers achieve a 30% reduction in CO2 emissions per tonne of crop produced.
Dirk Voeste (DV): I believe that agriculture will see one of the most accelerated transformations over the next ten years. Let me take the example of two recent Nobel Prizes to highlight my point. One is the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year, which recognised the CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing technology. It symbolises the need for innovation to cope with all the challenges facing modern agriculture. The Nobel Prize in Peace to the UN’s World Food Programme reaffirms the need for affordable and sustainable food supply to the world’s population.
The challenges faced by agriculture are likely to increase manifold because of climate change. This prompts us to save resources and use them gently, while embedding available technologies to deliver on societal expectations. Farmers also have to cope with several uncertainties such as unpredictable weather events, and, in recent past, the trade war between the US and China. The core of our activities is to ascertain how best to mitigate the impacts. The target for us is not only to produce more, but also to produce better, while ensuring a smaller footprint from our activities.
The "better yield" concept can mean different things. In terms of the Green Deal in Europe, this will be about optimised use of resources and ensuring better biodiversity through targeted application of crop protection products and enhanced digitalisation of farm activities. In the African and Asian context, this will most likely be about the accelerated production of carbohydrates.
Taking these into account, sustainability for us means finding the right balance between value creation and meeting societal expectations. We focus on two aspects: ensuring our activities protect the environment and scarce resources while enabling farmers to economically.
NBTs are widely recognised and the public debate on the topic is now marked by more openness for technologies such as genome editing. But I think the Nobel Prize will not have a significant impact in terms of the European society’s acceptance of NBTs. However, other factors, such as the drought in northern Europe and France last year, along with severe weather anomalies in the UK, may influence the decision on adoption of NBTs.
With the scale of transformation and the magnitude of the task in front of us, we must admit that it cannot be done alone. So, it is not only collaboration among crop protection companies, but also collaboration across the value chain and among stakeholders. What we are seeing is a more open debate from all perspectives in terms of the understanding of agriculture, particularly in the context of Europe. You often see organic farming being pitted against conventional agriculture. But it is not about choosing one against the other. It is about determining what is right for producing a better yield under a particular set of conditions.
Each product is assigned to one of four categories: Accelerator (substantial sustainability contribution); Performer (meet basic sustainability standards in the market), Transitioner (has specific sustainability issues that are being addressed) or Challenged (significant sustainability concern identified and action plan being developed or implemented). Across BASF’s entire portfolio, 28.9% of products are Accelerators, 61.9% are Performers, 9.1% are Transitioners, and 0.1% are Challenged.
BASF has set itself a target of increasing the sales of Accelerator solutions from EUR15 billion (USD17.9 billion) in 2019 to EUR22 billion (USD26.2 billion) by 2025.
As MRC informed previously, BASF restarted its No. 1 steam cracker following a maintenance turnaround on September 30, 2019. The plant was shut for maintenance in mid-August, 2019. Located at Ludwigshafen in Germany, the No. 1 cracker has an ethylene production capacity of 235,000 mt/year and a propylene production capacity of 125,000 mt/year.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,760,950 tonnes in the first ten months of 2020, up by 3% year on year. Only high density polyethylene (HDPE) and linear low density polyethylene (LLDPE) shipments increased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market reached 978,870 tonnes in January-October 2020 (calculated using the formula: production minus exports plus imports minus producers' inventories as of 1 January, 2020). Supply of exclusively of PP random copolymer increased.
BASF is the leading chemical company. It produces a wide range of chemicals, for example solvents, amines, resins, glues, electronic-grade chemicals, industrial gases, basic petrochemicals and inorganic chemicals. The most important customers for this segment are the pharmaceutical, construction, textile and automotive industries.
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